


Follows On Like Clockwork

by youabird (nevulon)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Medical Procedures, Minor Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Past Suicidal Thoughts, Recovered Memories, Very Mild Gore, not avengers 2 compliant, somebody shoots the president
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 04:36:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3677736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevulon/pseuds/youabird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve would do anything for Bucky. He tore the world apart and chased HYDRA back into the shadows. He stepped back when Bucky turned himself in to the feds. Now that Bucky's broken himself out of custody in order to take down the corrupt agency that tried to use him again, Steve'll be damned if he doesn't stand by him. The only problem? The Winter Soldier swears he's not Bucky.</p><p>Or, genetically altered superheroes point guns at each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> whoahhhh I had to get this all out before Avengers 2, since this in no way resembles MCU after ca:tws?? haha, it'll all be fine. the avengers is just ugly trees anyway.

Two days after the Winter Soldier gets out of prison, he drops in on Steve’s favorite café in Flatbush. Steve chokes on his Reuben, and Bucky shakes his hair out of his face and smiles. “Nice, Rogers,” he says. He passes over a napkin.

Steve doesn’t accept it, even though he has Thousand Island dressing all over his chin. Bucky? Nineteen hours ago, Steve was in Avengers Tower, glued to the flatscreen. Actual bullets whizzed past as they forced him into a dark, unmarked government car. Just one clip, over and over again. Steve left smudgy handprints all over the screen from trying to reach through the glass and somehow touch him. As if he could will the hair out of his face. As if seeing his eyes would let him  _know_. 

“Relax,” Bucky says. “You’ve got a .32 caliber pistol in your jeans and a butter knife in your hand. I’m not packing anything. See?” He pulls his sweatshirt up, exposes miles of pale skin, and then props his elbow on the table. “I didn’t come here to fight.”

Steve’s not an idiot, though, so his hand is on his gun. “The arm.”

Still smiling that catlike smile, Bucky slides the zipper down on his sweatshirt. He bares his shoulder, almost like a tease, showing off the metallic stump still grafted to his body but attached to nothing. “Seem to have misplaced it.”

It makes him sick. He did the research—read the folder, scoured the leaked data, ripped the bank vault apart with his own two hands—and he knows what that arm was. What it did to Bucky. He shoves his sandwich away, nauseated.

“Seriously,” Bucky says, nodding at the napkin. “You got sauce on your face.”

He doesn’t reach for it. He’s still coiled like a spring, hand on his gun, mind whirring through the possibilities, even though Bucky looks like he couldn’t care less. He flags the waitress down and orders, flashing her an easy grin: “Yeah, can I get some toast, a cup of black coffee and a glass of water for my friend? Thanks darling.” She blushes prettily and speeds off to put their order in.

When Bucky refocuses on Steve, his smile finally begins to slip. “Would you ease up a little? You’re sitting by a plate-glass window. I coulda shot you from across the street without you ever seeing my face.”

“Maybe you wanted me to see your face.”

He rolls his eyes. It’s the same expression, identical to the best friend Steve lost in ’45, but things can’t be that simple. They just can’t. More than anything, it’s his calm that spooks Steve. If he can’t sit here without wanting to scream, to throw up, to trash this diner and everybody in it, Bucky shouldn’t get to either.

“Look,” Bucky says. He puts his hand palm-up on the table and slides it across to Steve. “Let’s pretend for a minute like you don’t have that gun aimed at me under the table. And that I didn’t spend last week in the federal pen, okay? Can we try that?”

“You tried to kill me,” Steve points out. A spasm passes over Bucky’s face. “I’m not saying I blame you for it, but that’s what happened.”

“Isn’t that the truth. Ah, thanks darling,” he says, as the waitress neatly inserts herself between them. She passes Steve a glass of water shyly, still blushing. She has no idea that there’s a loaded gun held under the table with a shaking hand. “Thanks so much. Here, keep the change.” Bucky must have passed her a large bill, because she turns an even darker red before disappearing.

“You come to Brooklyn just to flirt with waitresses?”  _Feeling nostalgic?_ , a traitorous part of his brain adds, but he manages to keep it inside. “I figured government employment was terms of your release.”

“Stark tell you that?”

“No,” Steve says, stung. “I guessed.”

Bucky sighs. He sips his coffee and peers out the window at the pigeons clucking on the street. A long red gash winds across his throat. It has to be fresh. “You ever kill anybody good, Steve?”

But Bucky knows the answer to this question. Steve has killed a lot of people. Too many. Mostly soldiers, some traitors, all enemies. Maybe they were good. It was a question that haunted him all over the backwaters of Europe, kept him up much longer than Morita’s snoring.

“Well I have,” Bucky says, turning back to him. There’s a laser-focus in his eyes, something that could be sniper training or the assassin that they beat his body into. Either way it scares Steve shitless. “A lot of people. Kids, Rogers.” His hand flexes against the table, and Steve’s finger nearly slips to the trigger. His voice remains flat as he continues. “I don’t trust many people, and I especially don’t trust people who hand me a new list of targets.”

Forty-five hours ago, Bucky was getting out of prison on a sketchy deal. Sketchy deals come courtesy of sketchy people. Nineteen hours ago, they went public with the news, and now he’s sitting here. The rock in Steve’s stomach liquefies, filling him with dread. “You went off the grid,” he says. He lets the gun in his hand droop.

His answering smile is tight around the edges. “Ask me no questions, Rogers.”

“Why haven’t I heard about this?” Why hasn’t Tony heard about this. He suddenly wants to check his cellphone, see if Twitter has blown up, but he’s afraid to look away.

Bucky lets him sweat as he finishes his toast. “Trust me, I don’t think they’re in a hurry to let the world know they let me loose.”

He feels sick. There’s too much potential to go wrong here, starting with the firestarter sitting across from him and ending with the collective firepower of the United States government. Worst of all, he knows he’s not going to do a damn thing, even to call back to base. He can’t. It’s  _Bucky_.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Lie low. Avoid prison. Maybe even—hey, can I eat this?” When Steve nods, Bucky tucks into his half-eaten Reuben with relish, even though he wrinkles his nose as he eats. “Is this cabbage? Ugh. No, I want it. I’m starving.” Another stab of pain carves its way up Steve’s chest at that. “Maybe even do a few good things. I don’t know, I’m still working on it.”

He swallows against the lump in his throat. A few good things? Before the fall, Bucky was the best person he knew. He rescued half-dead kittens and girls with handsy dates and little shitheads with foul tempers and a moral code too big for their skinny bodies. He paid Steve’s rent in full at least a half-dozen times, and more often than not, he went hungry in January to keep Steve, his parents and his sisters all fed. He cried every single night on the front lines, silent gasping tears like his heart was breaking, and he wouldn’t let anyone, not even Steve, comfort him.

Even the fall couldn’t rub that out of him. Whatever he is, he’s good.

Steve watches Bucky swallow the rest of his sandwich in two bites. The gun lies against his knee with the safety still off. “You’ll be in danger.”

Bucky doesn’t say  _figures,_  but only because his mouth is full. The twist of his lips says it anyway. “You can’t do this alone, you know,” Steve says.

Reckless, idiotic Bucky—he shrugs and drinks more coffee. “Depends.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I’m not asking for your help, Rogers.”

“Then what are you asking me for?”

He glances down at his hand. Steve’s gaze follows him, and he notices his fingernails for the first time. They’re fresh. New. Half-grown in. For a sudden, terrible moment, he wants to burn the whole world down.

But then Bucky sighs and licks Thousand Island dressing off his fingers. “Half a sandwich, I guess. And for you to quit pointing that gun at me.”

He can’t bring himself to put it away, but he points it lower. At Bucky’s foot. It’d hurt, but they’ve both been through their share of pain. “I thought you were dead.” He’s surprised by how fractured the words come out, how bitter and sad they sound.

Bucky smiles humorlessly. “So did I.”

But it’s not the same. “I thought… I thought you were  _gone_.”

Watching the smile slide off his face isn’t anything like Steve’s memories. Bucky always smiled. He smiled his way through a burning HYDRA lab and laughed through the starving Depression and once got thrown out of a London whorehouse with two broken ribs and a penknife in his shoulder, and the fucker had still been grinning when Morita pried it out. This expression is new. Just like his fingernails.

“I am gone,” he says.

In an instant, Steve’s world shatters. “What.”

Bucky looks at him. No, his head tells his ridiculous, fluttering heart—the Winter Soldiers looks at him. Same blue eyes, same face, but everything else all twisted up and different. Puzzle pieces. “I’m not him, Rogers. You know that, right.”

The metal of the gun barrel is cold when he presses it against Bucky’s stomach. The Soldier’s. Either way, the man sitting across from him flinches. “Fuck you,” Steve says. His hand is shaking badly. “Who do you think you  _are_ —”

“People are looking,” Bucky says softly. It’s true: heads flick nervously away when Steve turns his head the slightest bit. Maybe they don’t know that he’s Captain America, maybe they can’t see the gun in his clenched fist, but people taste emotions on the air. Slowly, he moves away, gun still trained on Bucky’s gut.

“Why did you come here,” he says, “Trying to rub it in?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.” He’s a traitor. He freed himself from government custody and ran to Brooklyn, to mess with him, to get inside his head. Why didn’t he call for back-up? Why, Steven, why? Why do you do these stupid things? Don’t you  _want_ to live?  
  
He wishes the little voice in his head didn’t sound like Bucky, even after all these years.

The Soldier rattles a spoon against the inside of his empty coffee cup. He doesn’t meet Steve’s eyes. Instead, he lets his gaze wander over the crowd, still intently not looking at them, still straining to overhear. He’s not Bucky. He’s a killer wearing Bucky’s face.

“Tell me what you’re doing here,” Steve says. “Even if you make it out of here alive, the Avengers will be after in you in 10 minutes, tops.”

Mild irritation curls the left side of his mouth up. Every time the Soldier moves, Steve sees Bucky in him. It’s eroding his control. “I am  _not_ trying to kill you. Again. Plate-glass window. You don’t have to believe me, but I’m…” He exhales. “I’m  _trying_  to thank you.”

Right. “For what?”

The Soldier sighs. “You took out that bank vault, in DC. They showed me pictures, when they were trying to rattle some prefrontal cortex back together.”

It’s Steve’s turn to wince again. The bank vault is as close as his human mind has ever come to Hell.

“And you know, I don’t even know if  _you_  know this,” he says, all conspiratorial, like he’s telling Steve some campfire gossip on a clear night under thousands of stars, “But they rustled up a couple of HYDRA drones who’d done some of the brainwashing. Trying to piece together what they’d broken.” A shiver rolls over Bucky’s body. Steve doesn’t think he’s imagining how the Soldier instinctively reaches for the arm that isn’t there. “And he said that before the last procedure, that it—that  _I_  had said something about you.”

And then he shrugs and snaps the spoon in his hand in half. “That’s all.”

The shards of spoon clatter to the tabletop. Steve stares between the broken pieces before him, head racing. “You said something. About me.”

“Yeah. So what you said, up on that airship, it wasn’t just dumb luck. It got through to me. Don’t ask me how,” he says, rapping his knuckles against his skull. “I’m like a sieve. I don’t remember it.”

He’s lying. Steve’s not sure how he knows, but he knows. He remembers something and he doesn’t want to say. Which is fine—this conversation has had sufficient twists and turns. All this information, these secrets, they're pushing down on his lungs like he’ll never breathe easy again. He wants to cry. He wants to shoot the Soldier in the stomach. He wants to do— _something._

He does nothing.

They sit there in silence, with Bucky’s hand curled against the tabletop and Steve’s hands wrapped around the gun. He should at least call the Avengers. He’s eating breakfast with a wanted fugitive from justice. He should make himself make the call.

“Where are you going to go?” he asks, while he’s still making up his mind.

“Don’t know. Might stay local. Might not.” There’s a warm, unfamiliar humanity in the Soldier’s expression that wasn’t there before. Instead of that incisive, sharp focus, there’s scrutiny in Bucky’s eyes. It feels almost soft, like Steve is as much a puzzle to the Soldier as he is to Steve. “Whatever it is, I’m not going to get in your way, I can promise you that.”

Steve nods. It’s like his chest has collapsed in on itself. “Am I ever going to see you again?” he asks, voice quiet and brittle.

It’s Bucky’s laugh that issues forth, silvery lightness like the beautiful boy that Steve had known. “No, Steve,” he says, the same mouth that Steve kissed on Bucky's fifteenth birthday curled into a wry, ugly smile, “Not if I can help it.”

He shifts, and Steve doesn’t bother to flinch; he’s just going for his wallet anyway. He tosses a twenty on the table and says, “For your food.”

“Wait,” Steve says, voice breaking with desperation, as the Soldier starts to walk away, “Or—or don’t, just…”

The Soldier doesn’t stand on two feet while he waits: he puts one ankle behind the other and leans against the booth, adolescent posture and those big, faraway eyes. There’s a sadness on his face that Steve doesn’t believe. Who is he, behind that face that Steve loved so well?

He comes to some conclusion, watching Steve. He takes a very slow, even step forward, and knowing full well that the gun is still aimed at his stomach, he reaches down and kisses Steve on the forehead. It’s fast, brief and cool, and Steve closes his eyes so he won’t start crying in front of all these people.

Bucky’s hand, his warm, living hand, tucks a tuft of hair behind his ear. “Be good, Rogers,” he says against Steve’s skin, and Steve knows what’s coming next. He just can’t bear to watch.

The Soldier is gone when he opens his eyes again, vanished into thin air or simply walked out the front door like everyone else. Every muscle in his body screams for Steve to follow, but for once in his life, he doesn’t listen.

The pretty waitress comes to bus the table while Steve is still sitting there, exhausted past the point of movement. “God,” she says, holding the twenty up to the light like she can’t believe it could be real, “Your friend’s a real good guy, isn’t he?”

Steve wants to put his head down on the table and die right there, right in front of her. Instead, he hands her a $100 bill, watches her eyes go round as dinner plates and then tear up. “Yeah,” he says, for lack of anything better to say.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve insists on being allowed out of the Avengers Tower after he, Pepper and Tony get back from DC. Every single time he steps foot in the tower, Tony does his level best to keep him there. But Steve can’t live like that, a glorified hamster, even in the world’s finest hamster cage.

He doesn’t take a cab back to Brooklyn—he runs. 

His head is a mess. It was a good trip, but full of loose ends and mysteries to unravel. He thinks he’s finally found the agency that cut the Soldier’s deal, a subdepartment of a subdepartment, one so shady it made SHIELD look like the Red Cross. And it makes him  _angry_  that such a division could even exist, much less that it could be tolerated in Washington. Pepper tries to point out that he’ll make himself enemies, but he doesn’t care. Even if it wasn’t for the Soldier, he wouldn’t want that division to exist.

Running burns out his anger. It also burns out his shoes. The sole of his right sneaker peels away entirely somewhere in Midtown. “Aw fuck,” he says. Someone takes a photo of him with half a Nike in each hand.

He cops out and takes the subway across to Brooklyn. Nobody pays any attention to him on the subway, despite his soaked shirt and his tattered shoes. He could ride the rails in full suit and shield, and probably the only people who’d pay him any attention would be the panhandlers. Steve’s a sucker for their quiet desperation and their sad, empty eyes. He has a lot of money, anyway.

When he finally gets into his apartment, he’s drenched from the rain and from the sweat of all twenty-nine flights of stairs. He slams the door shut and peels his wet, broken shoes off his tired feet, tossing them down the hall. It’s only when the hunk of sneaker bounces off a strange duffel bag that he notices anything amiss.

“Fuck,” he says.

Someone’s in the apartment.

The shield is in his bag, still packed from his journey. He puts one hand on the zipper and cocks an ear, ready, if necessary, to fight.

“Save your fucking breath,” comes an unwelcome but familiar voice from his kitchen. “I’m  _still_ not packing anything. I guess I could murder you with this set of steak knives, but you could just shoot me.”

Nausea. Fear. Sadness. It follows on like clockwork. He goes ahead and fishes the shield from his suitcase, then kicks the bag out of the way, ready to round the corner into the kitchen and deflect any possible steak knives. “What’s in the bag?” he asks. He hopes his voice is calm.

“A couple of guns. But they’re unloaded. I didn’t want you to think I was trying to kill you.”

“I know, I know,” Steve says. When he steps into the kitchen, he finds the Winter Soldier at his table drinking coffee. He’s even more wet and bedraggled than Steve is; he’s dripping on the tile. “Plate-glass window. You could shoot me. I remember.”

The Soldier cracks a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It barely stirs the corner of his mouth. “I made coffee.”

For a moment, Steve doesn’t do anything. He’s got the shield on his arm, which makes him as close to invulnerable as he’ll ever get. The Soldier is breathing hard and dripping all over the wet tile. Last time, he wore a sweatsuit, something innocuous, but today he’s in head-to-toe black combat gear. Not the gear from the helicarrier, but something like it. Something built for war.

“How’d you get into my apartment?”

Briefly, the Soldier’s eyes flick over to the window. Steve doesn’t want to believe it, but it’s such a massive tell that it must be true. “The  _window?_  We’re thirty floors up!”

“Yes,” he says, and doesn’t look at Steve.

Steve notices for the first time that Bucky’s arm is shaking, badly. The way it might if you were to climb thirty floors up a building with one arm. That’s  _madness_. He lowers the shield, but only slightly. “You couldn’t use the front door?”

“Security cameras,” the Soldier says. He shrugs. “Get yourself some coffee, you’re wet.”

Says him. Steve fills himself up a mug and walks over to the table. He categorizes all the little details as he takes his seat: the massive bruise on the left side of Bucky’s jaw, the bulge of a radio against his belt, his hair chopped close to his head and wet with rain. He also notices that his fingernails have grown all the way back in, although he doesn’t know what to make of that information.

“I thought you said I’d never see you again,” Steve says, as evenly as he’s capable of.

“I couldn’t help it.” The Soldier still won’t look at him. He scrubs his hand through his shorn hair, making it stick up all on one side. Where has he been sleeping, out in the cold world? Steve put the rest of the Avengers on red alert for him the minute he regained his senses back in that diner, but nothing came up. No whispers, even. The world is a big black box and the Soldier is a shadow moving through it. Just as Steve thinks this, his eyes slide up and meet his for the first time. “Somebody couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

He sips his coffee. It’s dark and burnt. It must be a coincidence; lots of people like their coffee burnt. Maybe it’s just a sense memory lingering in the Soldier’s head. Burnt coffee tastes good.

The Soldier frowns at him. “These people you’re snooping around after? They’re bad men, Rogers. They’re not the sort you want as your enemy.”

“I know that,” Steve says. He does. Pepper says it enough. Natasha refused to touch the mission.  _I’m sorry Steve_ , she said, but she wouldn’t even pick up the file.

The noise that the Soldier makes is half a growl, half a hiss, grinding out of him like he can’t help it. “You’re not  _listening_ ,” he says, and he moves his hand, almost like he wants to reach for Steve. He must think better of it, though; he picks up his coffee again and twirls the cup around his pinky finger. “They’ll know why you’re looking for them.”

“I know.”

“Then they’ll know that you talked to me. I went to a lot of trouble to keep that from happening,” the Soldier says. “Nobody knew that until you started this, alright? Why can’t you leave it be?”

“Because.” He can’t make more words come out. Across the table, the Soldier narrows his eyes, and just as quickly he sighs, softening around the edges.

When he shakes his head, his bangs fall into his face. He left them long. Again Steve’s heart rumbles and again he quiets it: sense memory. Fashion. Coincidence. “Rogers,” he says, “You’re an idiot.”

Steve finishes his coffee and takes both cups to the sink. He has to hook his finger through the rim of the Soldier’s cup, avoiding the warm heat of his hand like it’s a cancer. He doesn’t think he could handle it. Luckily, the Soldier concedes, eyes hot and watchful on him the whole time.

“Never seen a man tidy up while holding a shield before.”

“Dinner  _and_  a show,” Steve bites back. It’s harsher than he meant it. He tosses the cups in the dishwasher and fusses with the soap tray, looking to waste another minute. There’s no script to follow here. There’s just the Soldier, sitting in his kitchen with his hand up on the table.

He turns around. Doesn’t miss how the Soldier looks away when their gazes threaten to meet. “You staying here?”

“No. Don’t stay anywhere for long.”

“Well, I’m gonna take a shower.” Stupid, stupid, stupid, the little voice in his head says. It  _screams_  when he puts the shield down in the corner of the kitchen. Easy pickings if you feel like it. The Soldier blinks at him. “Help yourself to some food, you’re still skinny.”

“Rogers,” the Soldier says. He gets halfway out of his chair before he freezes, caught between forces beyond Steve’s understanding. The expression on his face is funny: eyebrows down, wet mouth slightly open, eyes squinting in confusion. “You still don’t get it—”

“Then explain it to me after I take a shower,” Steve says, and before his nerve can fail him, he leaves the kitchen and the Soldier gaping after him in his wake.

*

He takes a long shower. In other circumstances he’d think it was rude to keep someone waiting, but that someone is an ex-Soviet, ex-Nazi assassin who hangs out in his dead best friend’s body. In this circumstance, he needs every available moment to get his thoughts in order.

Thank God his hot water shows no sign of going cold.

He washes his hair twice and seriously considers shaving his face before he finally gets the nerve to step out. Normally, he’d wear a robe. Today he slips into a t-shirt and shorts. If he’s going to have to kill a man, he doesn’t want to do it half-naked.

When he comes out, the Soldier is sitting ramrod straight on his sofa, staring at his knees. Steve makes a lot of pointless noise in the hallway, trying not to startle him. It’s him who ends up surprised when the Soldier stands, stiff and formal, as he comes into the room. “You’re still here,” he says. “I almost didn’t expect you to be.”

The Soldier cocks his head. It almost looks robotic, but he’s tensing his jaw, too—he’s frustrated. Steve sits down on the far end of the sofa, still toweling off his hair, watching him. “It’s like you don’t even care if I kill you.”

“You said you wouldn’t.”

“I could be  _lying_ , Rogers,” he says, exasperated. He looks at Steve’s bare foot on the leather cushion. His lips twitch. “Are you always this cavalier with your personal safety?”

“Always.” It was fine for Bucky to be silly and take risks, but every time Steve so much as looked at danger, Bucky had conniptions.  _I think you like it_ , Bucky had said suspiciously when Steve was skinny and getting his ass handed to him.  _I know you like it, you complete piece of shit,_  he exploded when Steve caught a Kraut bullet in the thigh and couldn’t stop grinning as he dug his fingers into the wound. Steve smiles despite himself, caught up in that memory, but stops when he catches the Soldier’s hot, interested gaze.

They look at each other. Steve curls up, his knees to his chest and his hair still bleeding water onto his neck; the Soldier sits so sharply composed that he seems to be sitting for a portrait. Neither of them say anything for a long time, staring at each other, listening to themselves breathe.

“Hey,” Steve says, when he thinks of it, “You’re getting my sofa wet.”

The Soldier glances at his wet clothes, still damp after drip-drying all over Steve’s kitchen floor, and then at Steve. “I—” he says, but Steve is already up and heading to his bedroom.

The Soldier stares at him in abject confusion when Steve tosses him a t-shirt and a pair of running sweats. “What?” Steve says. He crosses his arms. The Soldier just holds the clothes away from him, an almost clinical distance. “Put them on. You’re wet.”

“I don’t…” He keeps glancing between them, triangulating: shirt, sweats, Steve. Shirt, sweats, Steve. “This isn’t—”

“You’re wet, just put them on _.”_

“I’m  _not_ —” He breaks off, voice sharp and knuckles white. For a long moment, he keeps his eyes closed, and when he opens them again, he looks anywhere but Steve. “I’m not  _him_ , okay. You don’t have to do this.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Steve opens his mouth and then shuts it again, like a dead fish, like an  _idiot_. The whole time, the Winter Soldier sits on his damp couch with his damp clothes, eyes trained on a patch of the carpet just so he doesn’t have to look at Steve. His throat hurts so much he almost can’t speak.

But he makes himself. “I know,” he says. “I know that. But you’re getting my couch wet.”

The Soldier deflates as he lets all the air in his chest go at once, something between a sigh and a complete collapse. He stands up and peels his tac vest off his shoulders, made difficult because of the soaked fabric and his one arm. Steve can’t drag his eyes away from the slow unwrapping of Bucky’s body, his slim waist and his muscled shoulders, the flash of skin as his shirt rides up—

“Here,” he says, reaching for the tac vest, forcing himself not to see. “I’ll go hang this up, if you want to—” He waves his hand around. The Soldier cocks his head again, still frustrated with him, and Steve sighs. “I’ll hang it up,” he repeats.

He hangs the sodden tactical vest from the curtain rod in his shower. Like a chickenshit, he waits in the bathroom for two minutes. He tells himself it’s to give him privacy. He’s honest enough to admit that’s a lie.

When he comes back, the Soldier’s in his sweats and wriggling into the t-shirt. Steve collects the rest of his wet clothes, tosses them in the tub, and lays down the towel he was using on the wet cushion. “Better?” he asks, settling on the loveseat across the living room from the couch. The Soldier nods and sits in his vacant seat, back still perfectly straight.

“I know you’re not him,” Steve says after a long minute of unbearable silence. The Soldier flinches, chin angled away. “Shit. Sorry. Just… I wanted us to be clear. I know you’re not Bucky.”

The Soldier’s breathing is harsh; Steve can see his chest rising and falling across the room. Steve wants to grab him in his arms and bury his face in his neck, but he just said he knew the difference between the man in front of him and Bucky. He digs his fingers into the arm of the chair and waits.

“Look,” the Soldier says quietly, “Can you please just knock it off with this investigation stuff? It’s dangerous. I don’t have time to keep you from getting killed.”

“I can’t,” Steve says. He tries to shape his voice into an apology. He doesn’t think he managed it.

The Soldier stares at him for half a second, and then he gets up and walks to Steve’s bookshelf. His eyes catch on the carefully organized CDs and DVDs before floating over to the narcissism section. That’s Natasha’s words for it: all the World War Two books he could get his hands on. None about himself, though, or Bucky—he couldn’t handle that pain, even though he wanted to.

Bucky’s eyes scan the list of titles, and he jams his hand in the pocket of Steve’s sweats. “You got a lot of books,” the Soldier says. He turns his head to read the spines. “Couldn’t you stay in and finish reading them?”

He sounds like he’s pleading. A curious feeling rises in Steve’s stomach like a bubble, then pops and settles and like a stone. “I have to stop them,” he says. “If they’re as bad as you say—”

“Steve, they’re  _worse_. These people are bad, all the way through. You think you’re safe because of that shield, because you know Iron Man? Don’t do this.”

He wants to get up and press his forehead to the back of Bucky’s neck. That was their code, in the war; it meant  _I’m so tired that I want to fall apart, I want to lie down and die here in the mud, if you’ll give me permission I’ll do it right now_. He wants to feel Bucky’s heartbeat beneath the skin.

“Why’s it okay for you to go after them?” Steve asks, still sitting in his chair.

The Soldier sighs. He picks up a book about Dwight Eisenhower, who they’d both known, a little, and mostly by reputation. He threw Steve out of camp, once, for cheating at cards. But there’s no recognition in Bucky’s eyes, and he sets the book down. “Don’t do this,” he says again.

“I  _have to_.” It’s not a choice. It’s who he is. “This is what’s right, don’t you see that?”

“This is going to get you killed,” he says, and it’s quiet. Bucky would have yelled. Bucky would have sat on Steve’s legs. Bucky would have sassed him in front of the other men until Steve had to whip out his officer voice and threaten him with a court martial, and even then he’d have mutiny dancing in his eyes.

The Soldier only has fear in his eyes.

“I have to do this,” Steve says. He’s not proud of it. It’s a sickness in the core of him, one that can’t be prayed or pushed away. “I’m  _going_  to do this.”

The Soldier cocks his head at him, jaw clenched so tight it might snap under the pressure. “If I can’t convince you, I’ll just go.”

Steve blinks; that’s not what he was expecting. “What about your clothes?”

“Forget them,” he says. He turns his back to Steve and kneels on the ground to rifle through his duffle bag. He wasn’t kidding—there are a lot of guns packed in there. Steve feels another burst of wooziness as the conversation shifts. He stands up, hand on the back of his chair to steady himself.

“My clothes, then.”

For a moment, the Soldier hesitates, but then he shakes it off. “I’ll return them later,” he says, arming himself to the teeth. Guns, knives, hand grenades.

“So I’ll see you again.” A rush of something—he thinks it’s called euphoria—crowds his nerves before he can make sense of it.

The Soldier stands up, facing Steve, bristling with ammunition but with his hand up and open to show it’s empty. Steve can’t read his face; it makes him want to touch him even more. “Why would you want that?” His voice is so carefully neutral he must be forcing it that way, bidding it to lie flat and empty. “To hang around your dead boyfriend’s ghost?”

Steve feels himself gasp, or maybe choke. Whatever it is, it lances through his chest and lodges there. “ _No_ ,” he says, but he knows the Soldier won’t believe him. “That’s not—”

His face is impassive. His hand is empty. After a moment, he shrugs.

“You’ve got people, Rogers. You know you do.” He picks up the duffle bag. It must be so heavy, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Don’t chase ghosts. Just…” He hesitates. Steve wishes he knew what to say. “Just live, okay?”

He walks into the kitchen. Steve hears the window slide open, and then slide shut. He makes no move to follow and stop him. He mops up the last of the water on the couch cushion and throws the wet clothes in the dryer. He doesn’t stop to think about it, because if he thinks about it, he’ll lose his mind.

Three days later, a dry-clean delivery bag appears on his doorstep. Contents: one pair of sweats, one t-shirt, one note that says simply, “goodbye.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sam stays with him for three days after they close all the airports. He could drive, but DC is a maelstrom of bureaucracy, security and fear right now. Even for someone with Avengers clearance, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

“We’re out of orange juice,” Sam says, after the third day. Steve’s eating cold Chinese food on his couch, eyes glued to the screen watching the news replay the story over and over again. “We’re also out of milk, eggs, bread, and basically everything that isn’t sesame noodles.”

“Sorry,” Steve says. Sam’s watching him from the kitchen, hip against the doorway and a worryingly therapeutic expression on his face. Steve fumbles for the remote. For the first time in three days, the TV flickers to black. “I missed the JFK assassination. This is all new for me.”

Sam makes a face at him. “Man, JFK got shot in ’63, how old do you think I am?” He goes back into the kitchen and continues talking to him, just louder. “Maybe you’re thinking the Reagan assassination attempt, but I wasn’t alive for that either.”

“I was around, but I wasn’t paying attention.” He fishes for his credit card, but when Sam comes back out in his rain jacket and carrying a hastily drawn list, he waves it off.

“I make the same superhero salary that you do, Cap,” he says, making Steve grin. He buttons his jacket up to the throat and steals Steve’s keys off the end-table. “While I’m gone, why don’t you take a shower, or throw some garbage away or something? This place is a pigsty.”

It is. Steve has barely slept since somebody shot the President at close range in front of an elementary school. He and Sam spent the first forty-eight hours on lockdown in the Avengers tower, trying to figure out what to do. When the feds finally told them what they could do to help (nothing), they retreated to Brooklyn. Even so, Steve can’t stop watching the footage. Two shots to the chest. The president is still in surgery, still hovering between life and death.

He throws away the box of noodles and bundles up the rest of the take-out boxes while he goes. It makes the place look a little more human, but it’s all he has the energy to do. He flips the TV back on, right back to where he left, the loud pop of gunshots and the President’s frozen, uncomprehending face.

The sound of gunfire on the TV is loud, and convincing, but it’s not loud enough to keep a superhero from hearing the kitchen window slowly slide up.

“That’d better be who I think it is,” he says, voice carrying over to the other room. In answer, he hears two feet hit the tile floor. “I will shoot you,” he continues, hand reaching for the shield.

“With what gun?” the Soldier says. The breath Steve didn’t realize he was holding exhales out of him in a rush. It’s been three months since the Soldier disappeared from his life, and despite all his digging, Steve’s had no way of telling if he’s alive or dead.

He steps out of the kitchen, and Steve’s first thought is  _bad_. He looks awful, worse than he did in June. There’s mud and grease all the way up one side of his dirty white t-shirt, and his jeans are worse. A patchy beard covers his chin but not the wicked red burn that licks down his temple, cheek and jaw. Steve’s off the couch before he can think about it. “You—”

“Whoah.” The Soldier lifts his hand to keep him at arm’s length. “I’m good. It looks worse than it is.”

Steve doesn’t believe that. He’s known too many soldiers, too many victims to think that the Soldier would say anything else.  _God_. His stomach flips over. “Where have you been?”

“Around.” He lets his eyes flicker over the apartment: heating vent, fire alarm, couch cushions. Sweeping for bugs. “Rogers, tell me the truth: is this apartment clean?”

“Yes.” The Soldier doesn’t blink, but he has such an urgency in his expression that Steve has to restrain himself from reaching for him. “I swear it. Natasha swept it herself.”

He nods, but his tactical gaze still lingers on the heating vent with something like resignation. “I’ve been around,” he says, and then flops heavily into an armchair. “Just came from DC.”

“DC?” Steve settles on the edge of the coffee table, leaning forward. He wants to take Bucky’s hand. He wants to check his fingernails, even though there’s no reason to suspect they’d be anything but whole. He’s been on the run for long enough. “How the hell did you get out of there? Half the city’s still sealed.”

When he shrugs, both shoulders move. “Walked first. Then stole a car.”

“You walked out of DC? That’s insane.” It’s the uncomfortable twist in his lips that gets him. It makes some fact connect with another, lighting up a circuit in his brain, giving him the answer. But the thought is too crazy for words. It’s so crazy it physically hurts the inside of his head for thinking it.

And yet.

“It was you,” he says. His adrenaline explodes into his bloodstream; he’s never been this angry. “You did it? You shot the President.”

To his amazement, the Soldier rolls his eyes. “A  _little_.”

That’s the only words he gets a chance to say, because Steve tackles him off the armchair. It goes  _bang_  as it shatters underneath their combined weight, and Steve definitely gets a splinter or a furniture tack in the forearm, but he barely feels it. His fist connects with Bucky’s stomach, Bucky’s stomach, the hardwood floor. He’s  _fast_. Steve is faster.

“Unfair!” the Soldier grunts, kicking him in the gut so hard he goes airborne. He lands on the coffee table, which explodes. But Steve’s back on his feet, swinging the newly disassembled table leg at Bucky’s head. The Soldier blocks it with his arm and Steve hears the bone snap. “I only have one _arm_!”

“You fucking—” The Soldier kicks his legs out from under him, and as he goes down, Steve drags him down with him. It’s arms, legs, blood everywhere. “Shot the—” His vision goes white as Bucky’s fist slams into his kidney. “  _President_ —”

They can’t talk anymore; they’re too busy trying to kill each other. Fighting the Soldier is like fighting his shadow, a surprising violence. The last person Steve fought was an AIM goon in Los Angeles, all bark and no bite. He hasn’t faced a match for his skill and his strength since the Soldier himself. It’s a pleasant physical thing, to fight so hard, to scratch for the Soldier’s eyes, to feel his head get elbowed back and his lip burst like rotten fruit.

But the arm throws things off. With the arm, the Soldier almost killed him, even though Steve was fighting for his life. Without it, Steve can’t fight that hard; it’ll be over that way. He doesn’t want it to be over. He doesn’t want it to end.

But the Soldier has no such compunctions. He gets Steve flat on his back, knees pinning him to the floor and hand around his throat. There’s a five second stretch where Steve thinks he’s gonna really and truly die; but then he gets his hand on the gun on Bucky’s hip. The Soldier doesn’t squeeze as Steve presses the gun into his jugular, but he doesn't let go either.

He’s breathing very, very hard. Blood drips off his chin and onto Steve’s collar. “I think you knocked out a tooth,” he says, tongue fitting into a crevice in his mouth. “You did.”

Steve can’t bring himself to care.

“It’s okay.” The Soldier smiles a humorless smile and takes his hand off Steve’s throat. “They grow back, you know.”

Steve’s never had the cause to examine whether his teeth grow back. He hasn’t gone through half the shit the Soldier has, and every goddamn day he feels guilty about it. He doesn’t lower the gun, though. “You shot the president,” he spits.

“A little.” The Soldier gasps as Steve angles the gun in closer, enough to obstruct his carotid artery, enough to make him feel it. “It’s the truth, damn it.”

“You shot him in the chest. Two shots. I saw it,” Steve hisses. The red, raging part of his brain wants to put his index finger on the trigger. The Soldier’s chin drops to look at him more closely, a strange expression on his face.

“No I didn’t. I shot him here.” He presses his first two fingers into the divot of Steve’s belly, right beneath his navel. “Painful, but not lethal. Not supposed to be anyway. He’s recovering, you know. They don’t want to say otherwise til they find me, but…” His smile is predatory. “They’re not going to find me.”

“Stop that!” The Soldier listens, as any man with a gun to the throat tends to do. Steve’s shaking; the adrenaline is leaving him and he’s starting to feel the unbearable pain of his body knitting itself back together. “You tried to kill the President.”

“I tried to  _save_  the President.”

Steve scoffs. “By shooting him.”

The Soldier sits back a little on Steve’s thighs, so Steve has to sit up a little to keep the gun on him. “I shot him with a very small caliber bullet two blocks from one of the best hospitals in the world. If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead, Rogers.”

Yes. That’s true. Plate-glass windows aside, Bucky once laid on his belly in France and shot a grouse in Switzerland. He kept some very bored, very restless Commandos entertained by shooting things in the dark that Steve could swear weren’t there until his bullets pierced them. The Soldier himself shot a nuclear engineer through Natasha. If the Soldier wanted the President dead, he’d be dead.

“Why shoot him?” he asks. He can’t stop jabbing the gun into the soft parts of his throat. It’s the rage. He has to swallow it and bite it down his throat before it destroys him. But the Soldier just watches, blood still oozing from his mouth.

“Two reasons. One.” He raises his finger. It’s broken. Steve forces the shame deeper inside his chest. “Somebody else was planning on shooting him. HYDRA cell. Rogue agents of a rogue agency. They weren’t planning on hitting him in the stomach, either.”

Now that the Soldier’s left two slugs in his belly, the President will be behind solid steel at all times. Nothing like a brush with death to teach someone the meaning of safety. “And the second?”

The Soldier raises his second finger. “They were coming after you, Steve.”

No. His brain rejects the assertion. Elsewhere in his body, his unraveled ribs start to twist themselves back into place. He groans terribly, letting his eyes sink closed. The Soldier touches his chest, here and gone, a flutter against the pain. “I don’t believe you,” he says through gritted teeth.

“I told you.” His voice is lower. Worried. He touches Steve’s arm next, feather-light. “I told you to stay away from them. You know they’re on my trail, and they know you’re on theirs. They don’t want you finding things.”

Slowly, Steve removes the gun from Bucky’s throat. The barrel leaves a red indent on the crease between jaw and neck, the same shape and place that Steve liked to leave marks. Ones that said,  _you’re mine and I want the world to know it_. Bucky whined so sweet and slow when Steve would fasten his mouth there.  _Please please please_ , he’d say, fingers laced with Steve’s, voice so soft it was like his heart was breaking.

The Soldier peers down at him through Bucky’s eyes, and it’s Steve’s heart’s turn to break. “Who are you?” he asks, touching the mark on Bucky’s throat.

The Soldier looks away. “Nobody.”

“I don’t believe that,” Steve says. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling—anger or sadness or longing, some mix of all three so thick and awful he could drown in it. “You shot the President of the United States for me. You don’t do that for just anybody.”

His eyes slip closed, looking lost. The burn on his face is turning silver as it heals. “I owe you one. For saving me.”

But he didn’t. Every single time, he failed to save him. Even that first time, in Schmidt’s factory, it was Bucky who crawled across that beam over the inferno below them, Bucky who waited, Bucky who caught his hands as they threatened to slip. It’s always him getting saved.

“You fished me out of the Potomac.” He’s always known. Who else would have known he was in the river? “Doesn’t that make us even?”

“I remembered,” he says. When his eyes open, it’s not clear that he knows where he is, who he is. “I remembered…”

He really did lie, Steve realizes. In that diner in Flatbush, he said he didn’t remember anything, but he did. Steve forgot all the Latin Bucky taught him, so he grasps at the scraps of Irish his mother had used:  _Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh, let him remember, let him remember, let him remember me._

The Soldier gives him a curious look. Gently, he reaches down and fits his two fingers against Steve’s neck, just as Steve had done to him. “You were on a bridge,” he says, and his voice sounds hazy. Like he’s only half in this moment.

A train bridge? The Brooklyn bridge? The subway overpass where they’d shared a bottle of hooch on Bucky’s fifteenth birthday and kissed themselves dizzy? Steve remembers them all, as clear as a bell, as bright as morning.

He moves, picks up Bucky’s hand and kisses the curve of his palm. The Soldier stares at him. His eyes are so big, pupils dilated like silver dollars. Has anyone touched him like this, calm and gentle, in seventy years? Not trying to hurt?

“I knew you,” he says. He’s looking at Steve. He’s seeing him. Maybe he doesn’t see anything else but Steve. That’s how Steve feels, fingers curled so tightly around Bucky’s wrist, like maybe he won’t ever have to let go. “I knew who you were.”

Steve reaches up as Bucky leans down and everything else stops. This is right. Bucky’s mouth is soft under his, and Steve can taste the blood on his lips.

It’s Steve who pulls back first, but just to wipe the blood off Bucky’s mouth with his thumb. “Bucky,” he says, the first time he’s let himself say it since Bucky was arrested. It feels like coming home. He kisses Bucky’s jaw, his cheek, the curve of his throat, the space under his closed eyes.

He kisses just the same. Lucille Hagan taught him how to kiss, the summer before sixth grade, in the hazy August heat with their skinny knees pressed together. Christ did Steve hate her; he was sick with jealousy over her long red hair and her big green eyes. It was another two summers before a girl kissed Steve, patiently teaching him how, and years away from the first time he’d kiss Bucky. He remembers it was mean and angry, that first kiss, full of Steve’s bitterness and pride.

 _Why you being mean to me?_  Bucky complained in a soft voice. Steve had hurt him. He hadn’t even known. He tried to be gentle, tried to apologize, but it was Bucky who said,  _I wasn’t—you kissed me, Steve. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I’m this way._

He slides his fingers into Bucky’s short hair, swallows the gentle hiss of pain from Bucky’s mouth. He kisses just the same, following Steve’s lead, getting ahead of himself and then forcing himself slow again. It’s so familiar. It’s the sharp, clean hurt of his elbow in Steve’s stomach.  It’s  _Bucky_. Steve has loved him every day of his whole long life, but he’s never loved him quite so much as today, in his destroyed living room, with blood on both their mouths.

“Sam,” Steve says, short of breath. He’s winded. He presses his thumb to Bucky’s split lower lip. His brain needs to move faster, but it can’t.

Bucky’s eyes open. He’s still dazed, too. “Steve?”

“No,” Steve says, and he puts his hand on the gun as his front door key turns in the lock. “Sam. He’s back.”

Bucky looks over his shoulder and then down at Steve’s hand. He meant to shove the gun away, out of sight, remove the possibility that Sam could misinterpret it, but the expression on Bucky’s face stops him. Betrayal, he realizes, with a sinking heart.

“Steve?” Sam says. His gun comes around the corner before he does, steady like a soldier’s hand. What the fuck kind of picture is this: Steve lying back on his elbows, Bucky sitting on his thighs, the apartment in tatters. “The fuck,” he says, either horrified or impressed.

“Easy, Sam. You can lower your gun,” Steve says.

“You got a gun,” Sam says, not dipping his weapon for even a second. Definitely not impressed.

“It’s okay,” Steve insists, sitting up a little higher. He jostles Bucky, who slides off his lap and sits on the ground, his one arm folded neatly over his knees. “We just had a little misunderstanding, that’s all.”

Sam jerks his head back, eyebrows down. It’s a best friend expression, a very singular one that means,  _you are full of shit and I know it._ “Over what?”

“I shot the President,” Bucky says calmly.

“Do  _not_  shoot him,” Steve barks, because Sam looks very much in danger of popping off a couple of shots, at least in the non-lethal zones of Bucky’s body. “Shit, guys—first of all, it’s a complicated story and second of all, could you at least  _try_  not to get yourself killed?”

Bucky’s smile is lopsided when he aims it over at Steve. It stretches his damaged lip and wrinkles the edges of the burn on his cheek. Maybe it’s retaliation for the gentle hand Steve puts on his wrist. “Says you.”

“Says you?” At last, Sam lowers his gun, shaking his head in disbelief. He kicks a fragment of what might have been sofa, might have been armchair, out of the way, and raises his eyebrows at the chaos. “Steve, what the hell happened, man? If what your boy is saying is true, the entire federal government is looking for him.”

“It’s true,” Bucky says. Only by the grace of God does Steve not punch him in the solar-plexus. This is nothing new either; he paradoxically wants to kiss and kill Bucky all the time. He knows the feeling is mutual, too, and has been ever since the first time Bucky kissed him savagely in the middle of a fight.  _You piece of shit_ , he said, letting Steve stick his cold hands up his shirt,  _I’ve got your number, don’t think I don’t_.

Because Steve is remembering that moment, that soft sepia moment, he doesn’t notice the way Sam meets Bucky’s eyes, or the way that Bucky looks away. “Oh,” Sam says, voice softer. He holsters his gun. “So it’s like that.”

“What?” Steve says, hand closing around nothing when Bucky stands up suddenly. “This is, it’s complicated—Bucky?”

“I shouldn’t be here,” Bucky says. He snatches the gun up off the floor faster than Steve’s eye can follow, jams it back in the holster on his hip. At least he turns the safety off,  _God_. “Wilson’s right, you’ll be in danger.  I have to keep moving.”

“Wait!” Damn it. Steve is going to springload that damn kitchen window so it sticks; all it does is get him into trouble. “You can’t just—you’re bleeding—  _Sam!”_

Sam just sits on the couch. It’s the only thing in the room that’s not fucked up beyond recognition. He kicks his feet up onto the splintered husk of the coffee table while Steve glares at him. “Not my circus,” he says. The asshole.

“Bucky,” Steve says, following after him into the kitchen. He really does slide the window up, clearly planning to shimmy down the building again. In his bloody, disgusting t-shirt. Steve grabs his elbow and doesn’t duck when he flinches; he’s past that. Hell, he’d welcome a good swing to the jaw, if it would get Bucky to stay. “Where are you gonna go? You can’t just—”

“I didn’t come here for this,” he mutters. He doesn’t even have a bag. Where’s his duffle, from last time? How did he make it from DC to New York with only the clothes on his back? “This was a goddamn mistake, Rogers.”

Steve’s fingers tighten on his arm. “I don’t believe you.”

“Fuck you.” He bangs his head against the window frame. No, he lets it bang; he lets his whole body crumple. “I just wanted to warn you. To stay away from Logistics division.”

That word— _Logistics_ —Bucky’s never said it before. Steve’s never heard it, not in any meaningful sense. But it’s obvious what it means. It’s the shadowbox that’s chasing him.

He doesn’t want to let go of him. “Bucky,” he says, not sure what the next words are. But he’ll find them.  _Don’t go, moron. You owe me after Bethen in 1944, and I haven’t forgotten. I can’t do this again. Stay._

But before he can get them out, Bucky shoves him away. Hard. “Don’t you get it, Rogers?” he hisses. Full of contempt. There’s still blood on his chin. “I’m not  _him_. I’m never going to be him, okay?”

 _Stay_.

Steve stares at him. He was on a bridge. His prayers worked. Bucky remembered. “But you said…”

“I just…” He closes his eyes. He sounds so small, so sad. “I wanted to be.”

His heart aches.

Bucky—the Soldier—he throws the window open so hard the glass rattles in its pane. It’s hard work with one arm. “Don’t come after me,” he says, and then he looks at Steve at last. He’s so  _stupid_ , but he swears it’s Bucky looking back at him. The Soldier doesn’t say anything else, just cocks his head and smiles a broken smile, and then he’s gone.

For a moment, Steve thinks he jumped. He waits a minute, forces his heart to beat slower, and then looks. There’s no dark shape on the pavement, but there’s no sign of him to any other direction. It couldn’t be possible for him to get down safely. It must have been a dream.

But his lip still tastes like iron when he drags his tongue across it. So it must have been real. The word he wanted to say, he realizes far too late, was  _stay._

He shuts the window. He walks back to the living room, robotic and stiff. Sam watches him like an injured thing and doesn’t say a word. For a moment, Steve doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s not even sure if his body can contain him at this moment or if he’ll finally rip himself apart at the seams.

“Sam,” he says, “I think you should go into the bedroom now.”

Sam stands up. He’s a very good man, is Sam Wilson, and he’s seen a lot of very ugly things. Soldiers always see ugly things, things that there aren’t words for. Steve has heard Sam Wilson in his sleep, seeing those awful, nameless things over and over again.

If he can, he’d like to spare him the trouble of seeing any more.

“What’re you gonna do, Steve?” he says, in a crisis voice. But the crisis is over. This isn’t crisis, this is fallout.

“I’m gonna do something unhelpful and violent,” Steve says. He doesn’t recognize his own voice. “And I don’t want you to see it.”

For a moment, he thinks Sam might say no or stand his ground, and then Steve will be truly up a creek; but the moment passes. Sam goes soft with acceptance, even though it pains him. “I’m gonna be in the other room, buddy,” he says, moving with obvious care, away from Steve and his blast zone, “And if I hear anything too bad, I’m calling the Avengers, okay?”

Steve nods. He thinks that that’s as fair a deal as any. He waits until he hears his bedroom door click before he begins.

He destroys the couch. That’s a good start. He rips it down into component beams and then shreds them between his fists. Each piece can become smaller and smaller until it’s splinters, and then he can pick up another piece. The leather that he’s always hated tears like taffy under his hands. He atomizes the stupid ugly sofa, with its ugly wet stains where Bucky sat in his ugly tactical gear. He sets his hand to the couch and then it’s gone.

He’s breathing very hard when he’s done. He looks around, lets his wild eyes catch on the bookshelves and the TV, and he nearly raises his hand to those too. But he doesn’t—he’s empty now. His anger shrivels up as suddenly as it came.

He sits down where the couch used to be, where Bucky used to be. He cries like a child: bitter, selfish, and alone.


	4. Chapter 4

“Has anyone ever told you,” the Soldier says in Steve’s left ear, “That you’re very fucking annoying?”

Steve goes very still. It’s not a defense mechanism; if anything, he is the hunter. If he tries to turn, he knows his quarry will be gone, so he can’t move. He attempts casual. Blasé. Raising his martini to his mouth, he says, “More than you can possibly imagine.”

“Somehow I doubt it.” The Soldier sighs in irritation. It’s been nine weeks since Steve last saw him. The cycle is shortening each time. If Steve were a betting man, he’d say that’s not a coincidence.

“You spend a lot of time thinking about me?”

“You’re a pain in my ass, Rogers,” he growls. How is his voice right next to Steve’s ear? Natasha is circulating the dancefloor, pressing hands with the rich and influential. No disguise on Earth could fool her tonight, not when she’s looking over her shoulder every minute or so, scanning Steve’s flank. “You’re gonna end up dead.”

He skips the witty quip. Instead, he asks his martini, “What’s a guy gotta do to get even with you? You must have saved my ass a half a dozen times by now.”

“More like a dozen,” he snaps. Then he exhales, as if trying to rein himself in. Steve would kind of like to hit him. For one thing, then he’d definitely be able to get his hands on him, and for another, this is the world’s most boring party. Industrialists don’t believe in good parties, as a rule. It’s all gossip and canapés and cocktails. Steve can’t enjoy cocktails and rarely enjoys gossip, and nobody ever stocks enough finger food for a supersoldier appetite.

“Sorry,” Steve says, although he isn’t. “Still, I probably owe you a little thanks.”

“If you want to thank me, get your goddamn nose outta the Logistics division. Why the  _fuck_  did they ever let you into a covert intelligence agency, huh? Do you know how obvious you are, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?”

It’s true. Steve muscled his way into Senior Director Wallingford’s attention by putting her bodyguard in a chokehold. They know he’s onto them, just as he knows they’re onto him, but Steve won’t let his life dissolve into an ourobouros of suspicion and intrigue. He’s coming for Logistics. Nothing is going to stop him.

Natasha asked why. Of all the corrupt, crooked agencies in the world.  _Is HYDRA not good enough for you? Can’t we focus on the devil we know?_ And Steve had said simply,  _Bucky_ , and she’d shut up about it.

He shrugs. “I’m a soldier, not a spy.”

He doesn’t reply. Steve chances a look, finds that the space to his left is empty. It probably always was. He’s vanished into sand. When he turns to scan the room, he catches Natasha’s eye. One delicate eyebrow raises.

Steve toasts her with his martini.  _Please don’t come over here_ , he thinks. She frowns but turns back to the captain of industry she’s speaking with.

“You’re an idiot,” Bucky’s voice says again, this time in his right ear, making him jump a foot in the air. “And you’re not subtle. If you want, I’ll be outside in ten minutes.” And then, to make Steve’s miserable life worse, he leans in so close that Steve can feel his lips against his cheek. “Don’t bring your friend.”

Steve keeps himself from looking, but it’s a close thing. He makes himself inhale ten times before he even lets himself move, and then it’s just to cross the floor to Natasha. She tries to close herself off from him, angle her body away in a way that means,  _no, go away, I’m working here_ , but Steve can’t be reasoned with right now.

 “Captain Rogers,” he says, shaking hands with a man who makes too much money and cares too little about other people, “Have we been introduced? Can I just borrow her for just a second?”

Natasha’s so furious her wig is threatening to come loose; Steve adjusts it for her as he sweeps her to the bar. She fails to notice this small gesture of concern. “Are you  _kidding_  me, Rogers,” she mutters, through a charming, pleasant smile. This guy knows a guy who knows a guy who’s Wallingford’s deputy in Logistics and Steve just put his foot in all of Natasha’s hard work.

“He’s here,” he says, and for half a moment, she freezes. It’s a photography trick, though. As soon as she blinks, she’s effortlessly cool again, leaning against the bar to place her order.

“Barnes? Vodka soda, please.” She scans the crowd under the guise of a hairflip. “I don’t see him.”

“Not surprised. He told me to meet him outside.”

She smiles at him, and even though she’s still mild-mannered ingénue Rose Cushman, that smile is all Natasha. It means she’s laughing at him. “Tell me you’re not that stupid.”

“Oh, I’m that stupid,” he says, and he even manages to smile about it. He is that stupid. Natasha doesn’t know that the Soldier shot the President—he was chillingly correct that it would be kept under wraps, even from their own intelligence—so she can’t fully comprehend how stupid it is for Steve to go out on that terrace. “If I die, please don’t let Stark plan the funeral.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She fixes his bow-tie. That’s her way of caring. Steve loves her for not saying it out loud. “Now, can I go back to chasing the lead we came here for?”

*

He’s one minute early, but he feels late. He got nervous as he wound through the party, carefully greeting some people and snubbing others, and he went to the bathroom to splash water on his face. The wind singes all the places where he didn’t quite get if off.

“Fuck.” He steps out further onto the terrace, shaking water off his chin. “You better not have stood me up,” he says. He’s not sure who he’s talking to.

He waits one minute; he counts them in between beats of his heart. Two beats for every second. He’s on 122 when he hears the door open behind him, then footsteps, then a heavy exhale of breath. “If I turn around,” he says, “Will you disappear again?”

The Soldier laughs. It’s still Bucky’s laugh, although it’ll never stop being jarring, hearing it come out of his mouth. “It’s the only magic trick I’ve got,” he says. Elbows on the railing, he leans past Steve, looks out on the ornamental garden all strung up with fairy lights. The tiny lanterns cast soft shadows in his hair.

“Nice tuxedo,” Steve says, because that option hurts the least.

“Thank you.” The Soldier smiles wryly and puts his chin on his hand. His  _left_  hand. Metal fingers glint where they catch the moonlight. “It’s a rental.”

Steve eases a hip onto the railing so he can stare him up and down. The tuxedo  _is_  nice: he wasn’t lying. His hair is cut in that dumb affected style, _hipster_ , short on the sides and long on top, casting his bangs right into his eyes. Tactically inefficient. Surprisingly human.

“You got your arm back.” His smile vanishes, sudden and complete as flicking off a light. The arm twists uselessly. It won’t stay hidden under his sleeve. “Maybe it’s none of my business,” Steve says, forcing himself to look on the greenery and not at the flow of minute expressions on Bucky’s face, “But a metal arm? Seems like it might stand out in surveillance work.”

He scoffs, using the sound to conceal the way he twists his arm between his body and the iron rail. “You know a lot of one-armed spies?”

“Just one, and he’s a pain in my ass.”

“I’m— _I’m_ a pain?” Oh yes, Bucky was always a pain in Steve’s ass. He was born good at everything. Grades, girls, money: they all flowed into Bucky’s palms, almost without him noticing it. Even sex. It was disastrous for Steve to find out that Bucky hadn’t gone any further than he had, but he still  _got it_ , in a way that Steve didn’t. He’d had to let Bucky teach him. It’s possible that Bucky regretted that, giving all his secrets away so freely. All Steve could do was try not to give him any reason to.

Such a goddamn pain. He liked to make trouble when he was bored, and he could always sweet-talk his way out of it. Sarcastic comments coming out his damn ass. He challenged Steve, even in front of the unit, insubordinate dick.  _You’ll always be that big-eared punk who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone_ , he blazed, right before Steve threw him out on his ass in the snow. All night he tried to kick the door in, howling like a wild thing, til Dum-Dum took pity and let him back in.

Big mistake.

Steve lets himself smile, enjoying the chance to see him seethe. “You could just stay put when I come looking for you. Would save me and my friends a lot of trouble if we didn’t have to keep tracking you down.”

Something between a sputter and a scream exits his throat. “Do you have  _any_  idea what the charge for harboring someone suspected of treason is?”

“I don’t know.” Steve says. For insult to injury, he adds, “Probably a felony.”

The Winter Soldier actually spins on his heel and stomps away. Steve lets him go, lets him blow off all the steam he wants. It’s sort of cute, actually. The world’s deadliest assassin, fugitive from justice, cyborg with a martyr complex, stomping around a garden like a five year old. It warms Steve’s cold, dead heart.

He stops about six feet away from Steve, breathing heavily through his nose and glowering at him. “Stop chasing me.”

“Stop showing up at my house. I know it was you who installed that security alarm, by the way.”

“Fuck you,” he says. Steve doesn’t blink. “I am trying to do something good. For once. They made me into a  _gun_ , for seventy years. I can’t fix it if you fucking  _die on me_.”

_That_  makes him blink. He has to do it again, several times, because there’s something suspiciously like tears clinging to his eyelashes. The Soldier opens his mouth as if to say something. But he doesn’t.

It takes him a while to find his voice again. “I’m trying to do something good too.”

“Do something else. I’m not—I’m not trying to stop you from saving people.” He drops his head so that Steve can’t look at him. His shiny dress shoe gouges a hole in the dirt. “I know you can’t stop yourself. Just stop trying to save me.” When he lifts his head, the smile on his face doesn’t fool Steve for one moment. “There’s got to be people better worth your time.”

Steve licks his lips. He thinks about those last kisses, traded slow and sweet on the floor, all the time. Maybe there’s something wrong with him for always wanting to kiss Bucky when he was in pain. It’s an echo chamber inside his head, pulling desire up, throwing it in his face.

“You don’t get to decide that,” he says, because it’s true and also because it’s easiest.

The Soldier sighs. “Let’s walk,” he says. He jams both hands into his pants pockets and just starts walking, like he expects Steve to follow. It’s predictable, but of course Steve does.

They pass a few security guards with nice suits and coiled earpieces. Steve nods automatically to them. If the Soldier even sees them, he makes no indication. He prowls forward without sound. Natasha called him a ghost once. It’s romantic but it’s true; somehow he manages to walk without leaving footprints in the gravel path.

They don’t stop until they reach a culvert in the flowers, sheltered from security cameras and far enough to dampen noise. In the shadow of the wall, eyes hidden, the Soldier starts to speak. “You know what they did, to make me this way. A weapon,” he clarifies. He keeps his head tucked low to his chest.

“Yes,” he says. Bucky was gone for five months between the helicarrier crash and his arrest in Philadelphia. Sam and Steve scoured three continents, countless cities and the entire US government for him, and every day while he was missing, Steve read and reread that file, until it became a part of him, too.

“And you know what they did with me.” A sigh. He’s so quiet in the garden, so difficult to see in his blue-black suit, far from those twinkling fairy lights. Steve hopes he hasn’t lured him in here to kill him. “I killed… a lot of people.”

One hundred and twenty-two. Not including the battle on the helicarrier. No one could say for sure how many the Soldier killed and how many died slow and screaming when the carriers hit the water. Steve shivers. Not from the cold.

“I don’t go down easy,” he continues. He pushes hair off his face. It falls right back where it wants to fall. “I don’t think I can go into shock anymore. I can survive things that people shouldn’t be able to.”

Steve grabs for him. His tuxedo jacket crumples in his fist; he wanted to reach higher, reach for skin, but he didn’t dare. “Don’t say that,” he pleads.

The Soldier looks down at his hand in the bunched-up fabric and smiles over it. He’s surprisingly beatific, standing in the dark and reminiscing. “You don’t have to say that, Steve. I don’t go down easy and even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. I’ve done enough. I don’t have people pulling for me. Don’t you see that?”

Helpless, Steve wraps his fingers around Bucky’s arm. The metal is cold against his skin. There’s hope in the Soldier’s eyes. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

The beatific smile hardens into a frown. “It’s the truth, Rogers.” He yanks his arm away, bristling up with anger. “I thought you understood that.”

“If you’re asking for my approval on the world’s dumbest suicide mission, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.” Glib is easier. Flippant is almost too easy. It makes the Soldier tilt his head, jaw clenching, and Steve’s relieved to see it. Anything’s better than that resigned, despairing smile. “I can’t make you take my help, but you can be damn sure I’m not stepping aside for you.”

His mouth hangs open. “What if you  _die_ ,” he hisses. “What if some two-bit soldier shoots you in the knee again and this time there’s no one around to dig the bullet out for you? Captain America, dying for the guy who shot the President, who killed  _children_ , what’s that going to look like?”

“Occupational hazard.”

He recoils like he’s been slapped. “Rogers, think—”

“Look.” Steve stops him  with a hand to the shoulder. The Soldier might be strong but Steve is built like a garbage truck; when he stops someone, they stay put. “I found your deal. Lots of fine print, but I had a team of lawyers helping me out. Logistics wants to move reservations, to bulldoze low-income housing. To kill people in Pakistan with drones launched from Virginia. Wallingford poisoned reservoirs, did you know that? That’s who they are, and that’s what they’re doing. You said it yourself. They’re bad, all the way through.”

For the first time, the Soldier doesn’t have a retort handy. Steve’s thankful for it. The silence makes it easier to think.

“Maybe this isn’t all about you,” he says, as gently as he can. “Maybe I can be good for more than just you. Even though, for the record, you don’t deserve it any less.”

Wrong thing to say. The Soldier jerks his head away, sliding somewhere flat and affectless. “You’re an idiot.”

Maybe so. “Been called worse before,” Steve says. He puts his hands in his pockets and forces on a smile. “But I’ve got a team of superhumans on my side, and all you’ve got is a death wish.”

He shakes his head. Those bangs keep getting in his eyes. They’re so stupid that Steve almost loves them a little. “You’re the one with the death wish. Save  _anyone else_ , I’m begging you.”

“Try and stop me.”

“I  _am_ ,” Bucky retorts, and Steve has gotten so tired of watching him try to toss his hair back that he reaches out to push his bangs off his face.

The Soldier slaps his hand away.

“Well ow,” Steve says mildly, shaking out his wrist. Metal hands hurt a lot. “That was uncalled—”

The Soldier punches him in the jaw. Thankfully it was with his flesh arm and not the metal one, otherwise Steve would be relocating the bone. A great roar of sound thunders through his ears; his balance deserts him entirely. “You’re pathetic!” the Soldier shouts. Steve sits down heavily on the packed dirt, only half-comprehending. “You’re pathetic, he’s  _dead!_  He isn’t in here, he isn’t coming back!”

Steve doesn’t get up. A Mack truck just walloped him in the face. He looks at the Soldier’s feet, poised on his toes, catlike and ready to pounce. As if Steve is moving in the next minute and a half. “What the  _fuck_ ,” he says. His brain is moving too slow to be truly angry. It’s just that  _Christ_ , it hurts.

“I’m not him,” the Soldier spits. He looks like he wants to hit Steve again. Steve very much hopes he doesn’t do it. “There’s a million people in there who want you, and you keep striking out with the one guy who looks like your dead boyfriend. Alright? Get that through your  _head_.”

He rubs at his jaw. It’ll be a shiner.

The Soldier is still rocking back and forth. Maybe he expects to get hit. Maybe he  _wants_  to be hit. Either way, Steve isn’t going to oblige him. “You know what I think,” he says, climbing precariously to his feet. There’s dirt on his pants. “I think you’re pathetic.”

He doesn’t ask how. Of course he doesn’t. But his eyes narrow, so Steve knows he’s listening. “You say you’re not him, and I believe you. But you’re the one following  _me_. You’re the one breaking into my apartment, tailing me when I eat breakfast, putting a hit on the President for me. How the fuck am I supposed to get over him? Everywhere I go, he’s there. You’re the one pretending it was real.”

He flinches. It’s a hollow victory, how easily Steve can make him flinch, but he’s too angry to stop himself. “You made me think you remembered,” he says, and he shoves him. The Soldier’s too quick or too smart to trip on his ass like Steve, but he steps back. “Do you have  _any idea_  what that did to me?”

“So hit me again.” He gets in Steve’s face, posturing, big and imposing and plenty lethal. “Fucking  _hit me_ , then, Stevie, do it.”

“Fuck you,” Steve spits. He very nearly does it, too, can feel the power building in his shoulder a moment –but, no, he reins it in. This isn’t what he wanted to be doing, here in the future. This is never where he wanted to be. His fist is almost uncurled when the Soldier grabs him by the jacket and smashes their mouths together.

Not smash. Too harsh—this is shocking in the violence of movement, but it’s not hard. It doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t bite or knock their teeth together, he just kisses Steve with a desperation that’s agonizing. It’s Steve who bites down, on his soft lower lip, just to hear if he’ll make that same low gasp in his throat that he used to.

Predictably, he does.

He won’t be able to live with himself if he finds out if the Soldier shakes apart gently when he comes with Steve’s mouth on his cock, and that’s where this goes. “I’m not doing this,” he says, tearing himself away. The Soldier touches his lips, dazed. “Not with you.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is pitched low like a memory. He isn’t goddamn  _fair_. “I didn’t—I never meant to do that.”

“If he’s dead,” Steve says, “Then he’s dead. He was the love of my life, but whatever.”

Again, he flinches, but Steve’s too tired to guess why. “You don’t mean that,” he says quietly.

If this is a game, he’s not in the mood to play it. “Yes, I do,” he says. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. What he wouldn’t give to rest his head against Bucky one last time. “You know I do.”

His eyes get wider. Only a fraction, but Steve catches it. He stores it along with everything else he knows.

He turns away, starts walking back to the party. He didn’t let his hopes get up, not really, but it hurts every time.

“Rogers,” calls Bucky’s voice from behind him. “This doesn’t change anything.”

“You’re damn right it doesn’t,” Steve snaps, without looking back. It changes nothing. He’s still going to raze Logistics to the ground, with or without the Soldier’s help. “So you’d better stay out of my way.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He follows him, but Steve can be faster. Maybe he can leave all his troubles behind in this kitschy, awful, ornamental garden. “Rogers, listen for a second—just wait a minute—”

“No,  _you_  listen,” Steve says, spinning on his heel. “You’ve had the last word enough times. So get this through your head: I’m finishing this. I started this, and I’m finishing it. I didn’t get to save him. This is all I have left. This is what I’m going to do.”

He keeps walking. The cold scours his skin and pricks tears against his lashes. He does not let them fall.

“You can’t just walk away from me,” the Soldier says. But he isn’t sure.

“Watch me,” Steve says, and the Soldier does.

*

Natasha drives home. They have the information they wanted: a flashdrive with a series of conversations disguised as image files, neatly tucked into Natasha’s exorbitant designer purse. She even lets Steve put his feet on the dashboard and says nothing about hypocrites.

“You let him kiss you,” she says. He glares at her.

“How do you  _always_ know,” he says, annoyed.

“Woman’s intuition? Or maybe it was the stubble burn on your chin.” She smiles one of those mysterious empty smiles, a spy smile, one that means nothing. “I can’t even imagine you back in the day, serving in the army.”

“People were gay in Roman times,” he says irritably, looking out the window.

“God, you’re such a  _baby_ ,” she says. She’s never, ever impressed by him. Usually it’s good for him; today it just kind of hurts. “No, vintage boy-on-boy action doesn’t shock me. I can’t imagine you behind enemy lines because you telegraph everything. You’re an open book, Rogers. I can read every page.”

_Wonderful,_  Steve thinks humorlessly, passing his hand over his thigh. He hopes getting his heart pulverized by an assassin in his best friend’s body is sufficiently entertaining for her—

"Okay, now you’re smiling. Earlier you were moping like you got stood up on prom night, now you’re smiling.” Natasha frowns at him over the wheel, clearly irritated to be missing a piece of the puzzle. “What’s got you  happy?”

There’s a spot on his knee where a scar ought to be. Single bullet, deep in the thigh muscle, but Jim yanked it out and Dernier donated his cognac to clean it out and Bucky personally killed the man who left it there. He shook like crazy in Steve’s arms that night.  _You coulda died,_  he said, hot tears burning Steve’s skin in the hollows of his throat,  _I can’t stop seeing it. You could have died._

But it healed in 1944. It healed so completely that it was never entered into his medical records; there wasn’t time. For all intents and purposes, the wound never happened. Unless you happened to see it before the serum magicked it all away, you wouldn’t know. You couldn’t.

“Nothing,” Steve says. He won’t let his hopes get up too far. But still, his heart clenches in his chest, thrilling with a sudden flare of possibility. “Just something I heard.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Senior Director Wallingford.” Because he’s Tony Stark, he can’t stop himself from doodling a little mustache on her picture. It doesn’t matter; she still looks ordinary, homey, very middle class. In the old days, the bad guys wore a uniform. “Reports directly to the undersecretary of Defense. Her department, Logistics, comprised of a staff of 200 people, official count, officially tasked with, and I’m quoting here, ‘task-force logistical and operational controls for peacekeeping missions within and outside the purview of the United States federal government.’ But that’s just the official line.”

“Please God,” Pepper says, loudly, “Stop saying ‘official.’”

Tony points at her and waggles his finger. “Rude. These guys tried to kill Captain America on the street, I’m allowed a little drama.”

Pepper rolls her eyes, but professionally. Steve still hears her say, “ _Barely_ ,” under her breath.

“Speaking of which,” Tony says, turning his laser focus onto Steve, who doesn’t take his elbow off the table, “How’s the bullet wound? No lingering pain and/or splintering?”

“I’m great, Stark.” He is. For a brief moment about a month ago, he was perforated like a sponge, but today he’s good. “Eating my Wheaties and everything. Can we  _please_  get back to the briefing? I have to meet Sharon when we land.”

“Uh, rude.” Tony waggles his fingers at him, too. In his defense, he’s been awake for days, urgently campaigning in Bern for renewed global nuclear safekeeping accords; in Steve’s defense, so was he, and also Tony is naturally irritating. “You know, I have other superfriends. I could have Wally here killed tomorrow, in broad daylight, problems over.”

Pepper intercedes so that Steve doesn’t have to. “Problems  _not_  over, Tony, setting aside how that’s incredibly illegal…” Their babbling dissolves into white noise as Steve tunes out. Briefings are hectic enough when it’s the whole team and Tony’s shooting for a modicum of respectability. Transatlantic briefings with just Steve and Pepper in attendance are a recipe for disaster.

He needs this intel, but not immediately. There’s a lot of pieces in this puzzle that have to play out before he can move against Logistics. One is the handoff that Sharon is taking care of, probably at this moment. He checks his phone to see if she’s called, but no luck.

“Hellooooo,” Tony calls. One of his annoying robots pokes Steve in the shin. “Earth to Cap? Mind-shattering intel on super evil public servants? Seriously, who are you texting right now?”

“Nobody,” Steve starts to say, but then his phone makes a liar out of him by lighting up and starting to buzz.

“I knew it,” Tony says triumphantly, “I knew it.” But unlike Tony, Steve realizes that this long, drawn-out pattern of vibrations is a phone call, not a text; he snatches it up, heart pounding, wondering what Sharon has to say.

“Hello,” someone says, someone not Sharon—instead of steely professionalism, he’s greeted with genteel amusement. “Steve?”

It’s a Carter, but it’s the wrong Carter. Steve knocks his chair over as he stands up. “Peggy?”

“Hello, my darling,” she says. She’s laughing at him. Before she’s even started speaking, she’s laughing, and it’s a quick one-two punch to the gut, as always. “I hope you’ll forgive me for calling, I know you’re rather in the middle of something.”

“Are you sick? What’s happened?” He wishes Tony’s eyes weren’t gleaming with near-malice in his eyes. Even Pepper’s sad, knowing smile is like a kick in the teeth. He angles himself away, looking for privacy in a private jet. “Has something—are you okay?”

“Oh Steve, don’t be silly,” she says. Her laugh wobbles into a cough at the edges, but she sounds okay. Fainter than the last time he saw her, almost six months ago. The distance between Brooklyn and DC seems very short when he’s got her on the phone. “No, nothing at all like that. You worry too much.”

“Then…” He hesitates. Doesn’t want it to come out wrong.

“Why call? Well, I’ve just had a visit from a very old friends of ours. I’ve thought he was dead for a very long time,” she says, as Steve’s heart plummets from his chest and lands somewhere around his knees. “He’s in surprisingly good health, despite that.”

“I’ll kill him,” he says, not sure if it’s anger or something darker that’s got him pacing the whole eight feet width of the plane. “I’ll kill him.”

_Who?_  Pepper mouths at him.  _Bucky_ , he tells her. There isn’t time for nuance.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. It was really a very friendly visit. We had a lot to catch up about.” She coughs again. “Although I do think he had a bit of an ulterior motive.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” Peggy continues, the laughter creeping back into her voice, “I think he was rather interested in me marrying you.”

Steve lets those words process through his system. He really has no frame of reference for them. He doesn’t understand why this conversation had to happen on a plane, where there’s nothing for him to break or throw or punch.

_What_.

He covers the mouthpiece on his phone. “Give me something to hold,” he says.

“Like what?” Tony looks around. “Like a pen? A paperweight?”

“Give me something to hold or I’m going to hold onto your reclaimed teak table and  _break it_.”

Calmly, Pepper gets up out of her chair and walks to Steve’s side of the table. She reaches for Steve’s hand and slips hers inside it. Her hand is hot and slightly sweaty and very much alive. “Do not break my hand,” she orders, but without fear that he might.

Steve can be sentimental later. He puts his phone back against his ear, arriving right in the middle of Peggy’s sentence. “—wasn’t saying that, actually what he  _meant_  to say was that he was asking why we weren’t married.”

With restraint, he does not break Pepper’s hand. “Is he still in the room with you?”

“Oh, no, he isn’t,” Peggy lies, making no pretense at not lying. She giggles. Steve is going to  _kill_  him. “But that’s why he came. To ask why you and I never married.”

Steve sighs. Pepper squeezes his hand, but he hardly feels it. “I don’t know,” he says. “But hey, I’m free next Thursday. What do you say, you and me?”

“Oh no, that won't do. The groom wore Armani and the bride wore an oxygen canister?” She laughs, but Steve’s heart prickles in agony. She wanted him to wear his dress uniform, he remembers. She didn’t care what she wore— _you can’t get a decent pair of stockings in London for a king’s ransom, anyway_ —but she insisted on that. “No, darling, I’m afraid it would be ridiculous.”

“Well geez,” he says. He kissed her silly when she brought it up. He had lipstick and the biggest smile on his face when he swaggered back to camp, stupid with it. He could have walked into traffic and died happy that night. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

“That’s very good, because I’m ninety-six and I have dementia.” She pauses. Does she remember that night, Steve wonders, how they stayed up until dawn? The sun was touching the fog on the river when he kissed her goodnight, and her hair had fallen down around her shoulders. “And it’s just ever so insulting that you’ve only just now brought it up, after  _he_  suggested it to you.”

Oh. So she does. “Peggy,” he complains.

“I assume you have his permission this time.”

He puts his face on the table. “ _Peggy_.”

“He’s making a face at me. Oh, no, have I said too much?” Seventy years later and she still doesn’t give a damn. “Oh, he wants to talk to you.”

Steve has half a mind to tell  _him_  to go fuck himself, but of course he doesn’t; he keeps his face pressed against the table and listens as the phone switches hands. The Soldier breathes differently than Peggy. Very quiet. Like you could forget him if he didn’t know he was there. “Steve?”

“You piece of shit.”

He has the nerve to  _laugh_. Steve is going to strangle him through the phone. “Aw, don’t be mad. She was weirdly excited to see me. She gave me a book.”

“You asked her why we didn’t get  _married_?”

“That was a mistake,” he admits. What the hell. Is he sitting on the edge of Peggy’s bed? He’s close enough to her that her dusty giggle trickles through the phone into Steve’s ear. “I seem to have stepped into a fight you’ve been having for a couple decades now. Something about his permission?”

Peggy had looked like she was eating a lemon.  _You have to ask his permission_ , she said. Her hair was a mess, ratted up in the back and slick with sweat against her forehead. She was so beautiful, frown and all.  _You have to ask his permission to marry me_.

Really, it was the asking that bothered her. She knew—of course she knew—what Steve and Bucky were up to, the history between them, the strange condition of Steve’s heart, and she accepted it. Steve made it clear that their future, any future, had to involve Bucky, and she’d kissed Steve’s cheek and said, _of course_. It was the asking that drove her crazy.

“It’s a sore subject,” Steve says, “And I’m going to murder you.”

“Peggy agrees that you haven’t got the sense God gave a goose,” he says in response, with a definite smirk in his voice. This is not  _fair_. They were always too much trouble when they got together. One time Steve was seconded to a strategic meeting in Paris while Peggy was stuck behind the lines; he came back and they were having sharpshooting competitions and swapping his secrets like cigarettes.

Oh, he’d had words with Bucky after that.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Steve repeats. His audience, Pepper and Tony, pull faces. They must be laughing too. “She was ninety-three when I woke up. Did you think I was gonna marry her? Did you think I was gonna watch her die?”

That shuts them up. Through the phone line, he hears the Soldier stand, shuffle out of the room and shut the door. Maybe he leans against it, maybe he walks away from her entirely. “I just wanted to know why.”

“Because she doesn’t  _remember me_ ,” Steve spits. Don’t break Pepper’s hand, don’t break Pepper’s hand. Her smile is reassuring but Steve can’t focus on it, only on the mantra in his head. “This is a good day for her, okay? She forgets me all the time. She’ll ask me where Hodge is, if I’ve gotten mission approval. She talks about what we’ll do once the war is over.”

Get married. Get a house. She likes Elizabeth for a girl, grudgingly accepts James for a boy.

“I know,” the Soldier says, softly. “I just—you said the love of your life. I had to know.”

Steve growls in frustration. “It’s complicated.” Understatement. “You can’t just… She’s my best girl.”

“So why not her?”

“That’s a dumb question. Because she’s  _ninety-six_. Because she doesn’t break into my apartment. Because she says she doesn’t remember and she’s telling the fucking truth.”

Across the table, Tony’s ears prick up. “He broke into your apartment? Whoah, okay, shutting up now.”

Frustrated, the Soldier hisses. He probably has his head turned, cocked in that funny way he has. Steve wonders how he made it past the metal detector. “Not her, then. Someone like her. Someone you’d want to be with.”

He bang his fist on the reclaimed teak table. “Are you trying to  _set me up_?”

“No! Just—” A long moment of silence. “He doesn’t have to be. I know you knew him for a long time, but he’s not the only person. You can have another one.”

Another love of his life? Steve turns this thought over and over in his head. Distantly, he’s aware of Pepper’s hand in his. The plane is moving. His phone beeps with call waiting.

He ignores the call. “I don’t want another one.”

“But he’s  _dead_ ,” he pleads. It  _is_  pleading, a fine edge of desperation in that final word. Why does he care. Why would anybody ever care this much.

“Doesn’t change a goddamn thing.”

There’s a very long moment of quiet. It just feels loud because his heart beats so fast it hurts. “Is this because of Logistics?” Steve asks, just to have something to say.

“ _No_ ,” he says vehemently. “No.  _Goddamnit_ , you are so stupid it hurts some time. Why are you still going after them? Why can’t you let that be?”

_Because they ripped your fingernails out._  “You’re not changing my mind.”

“And you’re not changing mine. Goddamnit, Stevie, you think that briefcase Sharon’s holding onto is gonna help you out here? It’s not. It’s gonna tell you that if you move against Logistics, they’re going after the people you love. They have a long list and they’re gonna cross it out.”

“You talked to Sharon?” His heartrate kicks into a higher gear; Sharon hasn’t even called yet.

“Sharon talked to me. Jesus. I  _am_  the contact. Who else would be stupid enough to hand off classified info to Captain America’s ex-girlfriend?” The Soldier pauses, and when he speaks again, he sounds somewhere between ashamed and disgusted. “She doesn’t want to marry you either.”

Steve’s head is going to explode. “You  _talked to Sharon_? What is  _wrong_  with you?”

“What’s wrong with  _me_? What’s wrong with you?!”

Tony laughs, because of course he does. It’s ugly and braying and Steve and Pepper both look up. “This is the most I’ve ever liked you,” he says, wiping a tear theatrically from his eye. “I’m so sorry. This is the best thing ever.”

“Fuck off,” Steve says, and then returns his attention to the phone. “If you’ve jeopardized my mission—”

“What mission? You can’t arrest these people, Steve. They will  _kill you_. You know who’s at the top of that list? Peggy. She’s an easy target, light security, frail to begin with. Pass it off as a sudden heart attack and get out the back door before anyone notices. Then Sam. He’ll be harder, but wings malfunction, then Sharon, Natasha—”

Pepper winces. That’s all she does, but when Steve relaxes his hand, there’s blood on his palm. From her ring. He cut himself on her ring.

“Stop,” he says. “Just stop it. That’s not fucking fair.”

“So listen to me.” But he is listening; he always listens to Bucky’s voice, he just doesn’t always agree with it. Even when it hurts, he doesn’t hang up, he doesn’t walk away, he doesn’t give up. It would be so easy to give up. “Please, Steve. They shot you.”

Yes. They shot him. He always forgets how much a bullet or two can hurt. But it was botched, from the beginning: after the first bullet lanced through his bicep, he blocked the second and third shot, bouncing them into the first gunmen, and the fourth shot barely grazed his calf. He didn’t even have time to fear the darkness. He was conscious the whole time.

“I have to do this,” he says. “I just do.”

“He wouldn’t want you to.”

“How do you know that?” And this is what he’s afraid of, this is what his heart can’t bear—not what Bucky would have wanted (for Steve to move to Montana and take up dude ranching). Is it Bucky Barnes who’s saying this now, or just his ghost?

The Soldier doesn’t say anything. He breathes harshly, wet and loud, into the phone line.

He doesn’t trust himself to hold Pepper’s hand anymore, so he closes his hand into a fist. “Please,” he begs. “Please, I have to know.”

“He’s dead,” the Soldier says harshly, but Steve doesn’t believe him, not anymore. On the other end of the line, a door opens, footsteps fall, and the Soldier keeps breathing jerkily. “When are you gonna believe that, Rogers?”

He takes a risk. He has to. “Please, Bucky, just—”

There’s a sound like a  _bang_. Wincing, he pushes the phone away, and when he puts it back to his ear it’s Peggy who says, “Steve?”

“Peggy?” The tears that are stuck in his throat get swallowed down, his eyes dry and burning. He does his best to smile, even though she can’t see it. “What happened there?”

“He threw the phone at the wall.” The laughter has gone out of her voice, and she sounds even smaller. Small enough that she might float away. “Steve, I think he’s left.”

“The room?”

“The building. Steve… I think he was crying.”

He makes a weird noise, a gasp that he tries to kill before it leaves his lips, ending up with a sound like a choke. Pepper tries to offer her hand again, but he waves her off. “Goddamnit,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“Oh, Steve,” she says, rich voice full of sadness. He should have married her. He should have jumped off that train. He should have died at thirteen, caught up with rheumatic fever, in his own narrow bed. “We’ve all left you, haven’t we?”

“I have to go,” he says. He smiles. He takes Pepper’s hand and holds it very gently. “I’ll come visit you, okay? In a week or two? I’m sure I can get time off from my boss.”

“Please be safe,” she says, instead of  _I love you_.

“I will,” he says, instead of  _I wish that was enough_.

Pepper doesn’t let go of his hand for at least two minutes. He doesn’t look at her; he checks his voicemail, hearing Sharon’s excited voice say,  _I got it! It all went smoothly. The briefcase was right there where you said, no security, easy dead-drop. I’ll open it when you call me back. Call me._

“Sharon’s got the briefcase,” he says, hoping he sounds matter-of-fact.

“Cool,” Tony says. He’s attempting to be tactful. “We’re about twenty minutes from touching down in DC. Should be right on time.”

“Cool,” Steve says, and also, “Hey Tony?” Then he throws his phone at Tony, nailing him directly in the shoulder. He doesn’t throw a fraction as hard as he’s capable of, but it feels good to throw something, and Tony deserves it.

“Jesus H. Christ, Rogers,” Tony says. He rubs at his whole arm and chest. It was a  _phone_  . Steve got shot less than a month ago. “I mean, I know I deserve it, but Jesus.  _Chill_.”

“Fuck you,” Steve says, and turns his head away.


	6. Chapter 6

Here’s what is supposed to happen:

Sharon and her partner calmly enters the building. She asks to speak to Senior Director Wallingford. They go to the director’s office, arrest Wallingford and three other members of her senior staff, and escort them from the building. Since Logistics is basically evil incarnate, Sam and Steve and Clint are posted just outside the building, along with a dozen ex-SHIELD agents, in clear sightlines, prepared to raise hell, if necessary.

Steve prays it won’t be necessary.

So far, so good. Sharon’s made it to the fifteenth floor. Her back is to the window, but since Clint is at her six, that’s fine. Wallingford is sitting at her desk with an icy, inhuman stillness. No one’s pulled a gun. Yet.

“Sharon’s still talking,” says Clint’s voice over the static-filled comm. “Send the plainclothes in, though. Talking this much, you figure they’re not going out easy.”

Steve relays this suggestion to the rest of the team. Four guys enter the buildings, with two behind. How are they going to make it to the fifteenth floor without incident? Even though Sharon and her partner, Hanae, are competent, dangerous agents, Steve wishes he could have sent a super in with them.

“Sam, what’s your status?”

“Watching. Waiting. No sign of any trouble yet,” he says. He sounds almost bored. Bored is good; bored means nobody’s shooting. Steve will take bored. “How’s the perimeter?”

That’s Steve’s job, until the fighting goes down. He gets to walk the perimeter, check for hostiles coming in from all directions. He almost threw a fit when Sharon insisted that way was safest.  _You can_ not _march into Logistics in your star-spangled suit,_  she said, hands on her hips.  _I am not arguing with you. Pull your head out of your ass, Steve, and you’ll understand why._

Yes. He understands why. It’s too aggressive for the guy with a hit on him to show up and try to arrest the Director. Anyway, he’s too close emotionally. They tried to turn the Soldier back into a weapon, and they tried to kill him. They tried to kill Peggy too—the Soldier wasn’t joking about that. An empty needle in her vein. She walloped her would-be assassin with her IV stand until the Stark agent on her door tackled and handcuffed him. She was perversely delighted when she told Steve about that at their last visit.

Still, he wanted to walk in there. He wanted to push a gun into Wallingford’s forehead and see if the light would leave her eyes. If there was any light to begin with.

“Perimeter is looking secure,” he radios to Sam and Clint, “Gonna keep monitoring, but it looks good from down here.”

“You sure about that?” says a new, unsurprising voice.

Of course it’s him. Who else could it be? Steve turns on his heel, finds himself face-to-face with a loaded handgun. Sam buzzes back, something inane about how annoying waiting is, while Steve makes eye contact with the goddamn Winter Soldier.

“Got a bogey down here,” he says, into his radio.

“Can you handle it?” Clint asks. He sounds bored.

“Probably,” he says. He hopes he’s not lying. “Keep an eye on the edges for me.”

The Winter Soldier. Steve can be honest about who he’s looking at. He’s in his combat clothes, heavy and black, possibly the same ones he let drip all over Steve’s kitchen floor. Just by looking, Steve can count half a dozen guns on his person. He’s probably got twice as many knives.

“We can’t keep meeting like this,” he says. “People are gonna start talking.”

He’s not trying to kill him, which is the funny thing. Plate-glass windows, obviously. Besides, the gun in his hand is the same small-caliber they always end up tussling over. It’s almost romantic of him.

“You are the dumbest shit alive,” the Soldier growls.

“The mouth on you.” Steve steps a foot closer, just to watch him twitch. “What the fuck are you doing in the middle of my mission?”

“Trying to save your life. Not like you make it easy, you piss-brain son of a bitch.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. It takes a lot to shock him after serving in the Army, but he’s never heard the Soldier sound like this. There’s something ragged about him, despite the coiled power in his body. They are very, very evenly matched: arm for arm, shield for gun. Steve’s honestly not sure what’ll happen if they fight.

“Don’t tell me.” He slides into a fighting stance, watching the Soldier watch him. “I go in there, they go quietly, but they try and kill Peggy. Well, they tried it, and she gave the guy brain damage with her IV stand. They try to kill me. They fucked it up royally, buddy, you did a better job half-catatonic on a crashing helicarrier.” The Soldier flinches in pain. “They try to kill Sam? Natasha? That’s a risk I’m just willing to take.”

“I could kill you right here.” But he won’t. Steve walks forward until the gun is pressed against his chest, right in his sternum, metal cold even through his suit. The Soldier’s eyes go wide.

“So do it.”

He doesn’t even have a fucking chance. His hand shakes so much that Steve’s concerned he might shoot him accidentally, but then he lowers the gun. “Fuck,” he hisses, sounding human and afraid.

Steve takes his chance and looks at him all he likes. The burn that covered his face in September has vanished, not even an imprint left to mar his cheek. He hasn’t been sleeping. There are bags beneath his eyes. It’s possible that Steve is in love with him, no matter who he is.

He pushes the Soldier’s long, impractical bangs behind his ear. “You know I gotta do this.”

For a moment, he presses into the contact—he must be starved for it—but then he shakes his head. “I can’t let you die.”

“I’m not gonna die. I would never do that.” He smiles, heart loosening or unfurling or somehow hurting less. “When have I ever come close?”

The Soldier’s glare could peel paint off a car, but it’s Bucky’s glare too, so Steve’s immune. “Like when you put your shield down on that goddamn helicarrier? Like when you fought aliens in New York. Like when you walked into a HYDRA compound in Kiev with one regular human as backup, _you meathead piece of shit_.”

God, he’s working himself up into a lather. Logically, Steve knows it’s because he’s afraid, because he’s afraid for Steve, but he can’t help himself from adding, “Least I never charged into a Kraut foxhole without backup.”

“You did that  _too_ , you fucking—” He breaks off, mouth shutting with a snap, eyes huge.  _Oh_.

Oh, Steve’s got him now.

“You remember,” he says. Steve’s heart is clawing out of his ribs, trying to get free, trying to breathe in the open air. The Soldier looks away from him. He won’t meet his eyes. “I heard a noise and I went down in there. Killed two guys and captured the rest of the unit. You didn’t speak to me for two days.” His radio crackles with static bursts. He doesn’t notice. “And that bullet I caught in the thigh, that April, you remember that too. We were too busy to log it in the books, we had to make it to Nantes. But you brought it up in the hotel, in Los Angeles. I  _know_  you remember.”

“I don’t,” he insists. He turns away from him. He came to fight or to kill, and Steve’s going to rip him into little pieces with words. “You’re confused—I don’t remember any of it.”

“You are fucking  _lying_ ,” Steve says, grabbing him. “You were the whole time! All this time and you remembered me, remembered  _everything_!”

“No!” He sounds strangled. He reaches to peel Steve’s hand away from his jacket, but Steve won’t let go. Instead he pins Bucky’s hand to his. “Even if I did, it doesn’t make a difference.”

“Bullshit,” Steve says. The radio is squawking at him.  _Plainclothes are into position_. It’s not nearly as important as the wild expression in Bucky’s eyes. “It makes a difference to  _me._  Why would you let me think you didn’t remember? To push me away? Just to fuck with me?”

“No! I can’t—I’m not  _good enough_ ,” he shouts. He slaps Steve’s hand away, and he must have been so careful to rein in his strength; it doesn’t hurt at all. “I’m not good enough to be him. I don’t deserve it anymore.”

Sam would know what to say. He’d know the artful constructions of words that would keep blame from off his shoulders. But Steve doesn’t. “That’s stupid,” he says and folds Bucky into his arms.

For a moment, Bucky just stands there, stiff and awful, and then, little by little, he melts. His head knocks heavily against Steve’s, unable to muffle his small, aching noises. His metal fingers tighten in Steve’s hair, almost to the point of pain, but Steve couldn’t care less. Seventy-five years later, and here they are.

“I’m not stupid,” Bucky says quietly. “I’m not the one with the dumb plan.”

“If you’re trying to rile me up,” Steve says, “It’s not working.” It isn’t. His eyes are closed. Bucky smells like grease and gun oil, but underneath it’s _him_. “Besides, it’s a  _great_ plan.”

Bucky steps back, but he doesn’t go far; he can’t, not while his fingers are still tangled in Steve’s hair. “You  _cannot_  be serious.

Despite everything, it makes Steve smile. “You always say the nicest things to me.”

He laughs. It sounds like a laugh, anyway. “Not sure about that, pal.”

“Sure you do.” Like any good best friend, he was Steve’s harshest, most unrelenting critic. It was his strange, ornery way of being in love with him. “Remember that time you told me you could have shot me through the diner window?”

He laughs again, and for a moment, Steve thinks he can see Bucky,  _his_  Bucky, the laughing, dancing boy who shipped out for Italy on a Sunday morning. But then it slips into hysteria, or something like it, something that makes Bucky step back, shaking his head.

“What’ve I been saying, Steve?  _Listen_  to me! You can’t do this. You can’t do it. These people are—they’re—” Bucky shudders. A shadow passes over his pale, drawn face, as if an involuntary memory has seized him.

It breaks Steve’s heart. It hardens his resolve.

“You can’t stop me,” he says. He watches Bucky close his eyes in pain. His skin looks almost grey. “You can’t. Nothing is gonna stop me from going in there and ripping them apart, limb from limb. You don’t deserve any less.”

Bucky cringes away from him. Eyes still closed, he says, “I’m not going to talk you out of this.” It isn’t a question.

A wry smile twists Steve’s lips. “You never were any good at talking me out of boneheaded stunts.”

“No,” Bucky says, opening his eyes, “I guess I wasn’t.” And then he shoots Steve in the stomach.

The bullet slices through skin, muscle, organ.

A curl of smoke rises off the barrel of the gun.

Steve lifts his hand away from his stomach, brain tilting sideways when it comes back bright with blood. “You  _shot_  me,” he says, outraged. It doesn’t hurt. Yet.

Bucky says nothing. His gun is still pointed at the ragged wound in Steve’s belly. Bucky takes an unsteady breath in, and then pops off another shot in Steve’s leg.

“Jesus  _fuck!_ ” Predictably, Steve falls down, his smashed knee  _shrieking_  in agony and refusing to bear his weight. It burns white hot and all over. The scream in his throat chokes itself on the back of his knuckles between his teeth. “Why?!”

Bucky’s expression is still blank. His hand is shaking a lot. Steve becomes a pillbug, curling in around his leg.

“Fuck,” he moans. He should have taken his guns. His brain races around his skull, adrenaline making him blind and stupid. “I trusted— _fuck_ , you shot me.”

The man before him finally gets him trembling under control. He becomes empty and expressionless and far away.

Steve stares at him as blood wells up over his fingers. It’s so hot where it trickles down his leg. His stomach isn’t numb, not exactly; he knows from experience that the worst pain, the deepest, takes its time. He’s not in a rush to hurry it along.

 _Steve, Steve? Come in Steve,_  screeches his radio. He must have dropped it when he collapsed; it lies in the middle distance between their bodies, on its side, vibrating faintly with Sam’s voice.  _Are there gunshots? Wallingford is looking spooked, man._

Steve’s hands shake when he presses them into his shattered knee. In a few minutes, the bone will begin to knit, and then he can subdue Bucky—the Soldier—if he has to. “Bucky,” he says, forcing his voice to be soothing, to be calming, “Bucky, bud, I know you’re in there—”

The Soldier flinches.

“I know it,” he insists. “I know you’re there, okay? Just—give me the radio, okay?”

For a moment, he thinks his expression slips. For just a moment, he really thinks Bucky has seized control of the body he’s in, come back to him. But then the radio buzzes back to life, and the Soldier becomes nameless and faceless once more.

“Steve, Steve! Come in Steve! Something’s about to go down, I can feel it,” Sam barks. He’s passed watchful and nervous altogether, gone directly to afraid. “Steve, buddy, come in!”

Good, Steve thinks. What a way to die, with Bucky’s hijacked body pumping lead into him, and his friends alone and panicked, waiting for him to rescue them. He shouldn’t have expected more. Maybe if he can knock the radio out, he’ll have a chance to order his friends to retreat before the Soldier shoots him again—

“Steve,” says Clint’s voice, on the radio, “Steve? Sam, he’s behind a building or something, I can’t see him. I can’t see anything.”

“Should we pull back?”

“Give him another minute. Keep your eye on Wallingford. Steve, buddy, if Wallingford doesn’t surrender soon, we’re going in.”

All this time, the Soldier hasn’t moved. He’s listening to the radio, or to something else, in the middle distance. Steve can only hear his blood pounding in his ears. The Soldier had better finish him off quickly, or he’s going to regain enough function to make him regret it. Why hasn’t he shot? Why hasn’t he shot him yet?

He’s listening. He’s listening very, very hard. Steve licks at the taste of iron in his mouth and watches. Something isn’t right. The Soldier flicks his bangs out of his face, all Bucky in that moment. His finger isn’t on the trigger. He’s waiting for some other sign to call him home.

Steve spits blood onto the ground, gaining the Soldier’s attention for a second before he looks away again. “Who are you, really?” he asks. “If I’m gonna die, I ought to know.”

The Soldier surprises him by snorting. “You’re not going to die.”

“So shoot straight next time.” He can feel the bullet start to worm its way out of his intestines as his body regenerates. It’s disgusting and horrifically painful. “At least Bucky Barnes would have the balls to make it quick.”

The Soldier starts so violently that Steve tenses, expecting a third bullet. He waits and the roaring in his ears gets louder and louder and it should end with a shot. It doesn’t.

When he opens his eyes, the Soldier isn’t there. He isn’t  _there_.

Think later.  _Feel_ later. He scrambles for the radio, on his belly and dragging himself over the concrete that’s still slick with his blood. Agonized, revolted, utterly undignified, he smashes the radio against his cheek and calls out, “Sam, Sam! Sam, come in!”

“Steve! What’s wrong? You okay over there?”

“No,” Steve says. Understatement. He hopes his insides are still mostly inside, but he can’t handle checking. “Sam, Bucky is here—the Winter Soldier—he’s  _here_. He’s hostile, armed, and somewhere in the vincinity. We need to pull out,  _now_.”

“Bucky?! Steve,  _what the fuck_!”

Clint, luckily, is slightly more professional. He begins to call the reserves back, emphasizing that they need to get the hell out. Steve groans. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if the Soldier hurts someone.

“Steve, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“Caught a slug. Don’t worry, get everyone out of there. Get Sharon out of there!” The real pain is starting.

“Stay where you are, I’m coming to you,” Sam says. He’s scared shitless now. There’s chaos as Clint tries to coordinate the retreat; Sharon and Hanae are still in Wallingford’s office. Please get out, he thinks, pushing a hand against his stomach, please get out. “Steve, I’m coming, buddy, stay there—”

Gunshots. Automatic weapon fire. Even several streets away, keeled over on the ground, Steve hears them. They fill the cavernous air with sound, rising like a wave and then cutting off. The silence is worse than the sound. Each second lasts a lifetime.

Clint roars on the radio again, talking like he never stopped, steely and terrified all at once. “I can’t see, I can’t see what’s happening, there was smoke and then—there’s someone else in there, it might be him, I can’t see, I can’t  _see_. Someone shot out the window, there’s glass and,  _shit_ , somebody just got thrown out the window—it’s Sharon!”

Steve hears Sam’s wings. They’re not quiet, and they drown out the roaring in his ears that threatens to swallow him whole. “Holy shit,” says Sam, unexpectedly close. His cool hands are a heaven on the back of Steve’s neck. His body is on fire. His nerves are alight with the deepest pain. “Holy shit, holy shit, please don’t be dying, Steve, I am not fucking trained for this.”

“—Jesus  _Christ_ , he threw her into a dumpster full of cardboard—she’s alive, she’s  _alive_ , Hanae, Hanae come in, Hanae—he’s shooting someone, I think it’s Wallingford, I can’t see anything, Sharon’s  _alive_ , Sam, come in, Sam, Sam, something’s wrong, something is—”

_Boom._

The building explodes upwards, not out; Steve feels the heat but sees the fire race upward, an inferno reaching towards heaven. Sam’s crouched low over him, protecting him, the wings cradling them both. It wasn’t necessary—they’re safe. They’re whole. Again, Steve is alive and shouldn’t be.

“The building’s on fire,” the radio says. It’s on its side on the concrete, right where Bucky left it for him. Steve suddenly understands everything, even the bullets. Bucky tried to die for him. Again. “I don’t know if they got out, I can’t tell—oh,  _God—_ ”

The shrieking sound of the building collapsing will never, ever leave his mind.

*

“Si cujus opus arserit, detrimentum patietur.” That’s something that Bucky used to say, but never in Steve’s presence. Steve caught him whispering it to himself before bed, before battle. The night he proposed to Peggy, Bucky got so drunk that he said it over and over and tried to drown himself in the Thames. He only explained it once, and Steve hadn’t bothered to understand. “It’s Corinthians. ‘If a man’s work is burned, he will suffer loss.’” They didn’t talk about it again.

Today, the building burns. And burns. Long after they pull Bucky’s body out, it continues to smoke and belch ash into the sky.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> further clarification of warnings:  
> -a teeny bit of discussion of gruesome medical procedures/fallout from the explosion. nothing too graphic.

On Wednesday morning, Steve waits. Bucky gets out of surgery somewhere past midnight and is still unconscious mid-afternoon, so Steve has a long time to sit and remember old times. As he listens to the slow, persistent beat of Bucky’s heart monitor, he reminisces. For some reason, he can’t stop thinking about Bucky’s first apartment. His first shoebox little room, complete with window, bed and two Polish roommates who gave Steve the stink-eye.

That apartment always stank of cabbage and Bucky never cleaned up.  _What are you, my mother?_  he asked, a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, head out the window to blow smoke away from Steve’s delicate lungs.  _Always coming down here and complaining about my home._

The hospital room that Bucky’s recuperating in looks a little like that old, dusty room. Maybe it’s the green curtains on the wall, or the scratchy linen sheets Bucky’s resting on top of. Maybe it’s just that Steve’s gotten a little wild with lack of sleep.

“Hey.” Sam knocks, bearing a cup of coffee, the newspaper and a clean shirt. “You look like shit,” he says. Steve cracks half a smile and accepts the coffee. He doesn’t take his eyes off Bucky’s prone body. Beside him, Sam sighs and folds up the paper. “When’s the last time you left the room, Steve?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know. Certainly, the sun has both risen and set in that interval. Sam sighs again.

“Has he done anything interesting?”

“No,” Steve says. His elbows are on his knees, his neck extended, just in case Bucky wakes up and says something. Some elaboration on what he was thinking, what he thought he was  _doing_.

Slowly, Sam walks over to Bucky and peers down at him. He doesn’t look peaceful, the way a body might; Bucky has spasmed and convulsed all day, bones shaking and skin crawling. A new trial by fire. The doctors don’t have a clue what to do with him. Pretty much all they do is take notes and try not to gape.

His eyes twitch behind his eyelids. The handcuffs clink against the reinforced bed and his metal wrist. His jaw clenches, cheek against the mattress, and then he goes still.

“Man,” Sam says. He sounds reverent. He sounds disgusted. “This is freaky. He should not have survived this.”

“He said he survived worse,” Steve says. It’s a mystery  _how_  Bucky survived. A beam fell on him. A burning I-beam pinned him while paramedics did field surgery on Steve’s lacerated intestines and the DC fire department pulled people out. He was unconscious then, has been unconscious since, but the doctors pointed out that his heartrate had barely dipped.

Sam smooths the edge of the sheet out, ironing out wrinkles that aren’t there. He looks like he’d like to do something else, but he’s as stumped as Steve as to what that might be. “Speaking of unlikely recoveries,” he says, turning back to Steve, “How’re you doing?”

“Fine. Not like I’ll be running any marathons in the next few weeks, but.” Steve can’t stop looking at Bucky. He sips his coffee, wishing caffeine would shake the exhaustion off his system.

He nods. “Spoken to Sharon?”

“Not really. She’s with Hanae’s brother. She was still in surgery.”

“Hanae’s out of the woods,” Sam says kindly, turning to smile at Steve in that big, reassuring way that Steve so badly needs. “She woke up a few hours ago. Sharon was hopping around on her crutches, smiling and getting in everybody’s way.”

The boulder on his heart lifts, and he melts a little in relief. “Good. That’s… good.”

Two of their agents had died in the fireball. Eighteen Logistics agents, including Senior Director Wallingford. Steve doesn’t know whether to be angry or numb. He still wishes he could have pointed a gun at her, just once.

“Steve.” Sam reaches out and puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder. It’s steadying and it’s calming and it’s  _Sam_. Steve melts further. He wants to sink into the floor. “Steve. This isn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t Bucky’s either.”

For a moment, Sam hesitates. “Steve—”

“It  _wasn’t_. He wouldn’t do that.”

“He shot you,” Sam reminds him. His hand is still on Steve’s shoulder. “He tried to kill you last April.”

“And he got Sharon out. He tried to get Hanae out, too. He was  _protecting_ me, Sam.”

Sam has an expression that’s part frown, part pity, that reminds Steve of every shrink he’s ever known. “Even if that’s true, Steve, we don’t know his state of mind, we don’t know that he wasn’t trying to take himself down too.”

That’s true, and Steve has considered it. It’s just that he can’t believe it. Bucky is a fighter, down to his core. It was Steve who gave up—in Schmidt’s factory, when the bridge collapsed. On the helicarrier. On the long, dusty trail through Eastern Europe, when Bucky was so close but so far. Steve gives up. Bucky never has.

“I don’t believe that,” Steve says quietly. He wants to touch Bucky, just once. He really wants to brush the bangs off Bucky’s face, but they singed so badly the doctors cut them off. “Sam. I  _can’t_ believe that.”

And that’s the core of it. He can’t live in a world where that’s true.

Again, Sam sighs. He squeezes Steve’s shoulder, and Steve covers his hand with his own. “I know, man. I know.”

He’s quiet for a long minute. The heart monitor whirs and beeps to itself. Sam shifts but never lets his hand drop. “Remember in Croatia, when we picked up his trail again? That fucking taxi place, with the French guy who’d seen him. Why’d we give up, Sam? We were so fucking close.”

“Because it had been three months. Because every time we got close, he went further underground.” Sam’s meaning is clear: you can’t find somebody who doesn’t want to be found.

But he found Steve in that diner. Is that enough? Is that a sign?

“I’m so fucking mad at him,” Steve says quietly, throat aching. He digs his fingernails into his thighs, a few inches north of the painful pink crater healing into fresh, unblemished skin. “I’m so, so pissed off at him, Sam. He  _shot_  me.”

Sam laughs, and then shoves his fist in his mouth, looking surprised at himself. “Oh my God, that isn’t funny, I just…” He looks helpless.

But Steve gets it. If it happened to somebody else, it might be funny. When they write his next autobiography, it will be funny, if they write about it alright. He understands what Sam meant.

Steve squeezes his fingers and watches Bucky twitch and gasp in his restless sleep.

*

On Thursday morning, the CIA wants to talk to him. They were sort of polite while Steve’s insides were outside his body, but they’ve been getting restless with every passing hour. Steve’s not in the mood to talk with them.

“ _You_  deal with it,” he tells Sharon, who’s sitting at the far end of the conference room. “You used to work for them.”

“Too bad I quit, because if you shatter your leg in eight places on the CIA’s dime, you get some great hazard pay,” she says. Her eyebrows are raised, though, so she’s joking. Steve frowns at her anyway.

“I’m not talking to them.”

“Steve,  _someone_  has to talk to them,” Clint says. His voice is too loud, because the explosion blew out his hearing aids. Other than that though, he escaped pretty much unscathed, apart from minor cuts and scrapes from debris. “You’re the only one who saw him before the building blew up.”

“So?” He’s not being difficult; he just doesn’t see what that has to do with the CIA. A terrorist organization in the guise of a government agency detonated a building in downtown DC with his best friend inside. The CIA should be talking to the Secretary of Defense, not him. “I’m not going to tell them anything. Even if I knew anything, which I don’t, I’m not talking to them. Call Stark and tell him to send a fleet of lawyers in.”

At this, Natasha snorts. Everyone turns to look at her. “Just what this building needs. Another Avenger. If we get any more on the premises, maybe Logistics will make the obvious play and eliminate us all at once.” She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Checkmate.”

“You think the bomb didn’t take them all out?” Sharon asks. She’s professional again, considering each angle and frowning as she thinks it over.

“I think they set the bomb. I think they waited until Barnes was in the building so they could knock out all the evidence at once.” Natasha’s expression is a challenge, even as she swivels in her chair. Steve, irrationally, wants to tackle her.

Clint nods. “Pawn sacrifice.”

“Wallingford was a pawn?!” Sam covers his face in his hands. “Jesus, where does this thread end?”

Where threads always end. Evil springs up everywhere. Cut off one head, two more take its place. HYDRA or no, there’s always someone with a gun and someone with a bigger gun. When he turns to look at Natasha, he sees confirmation in her expression.

The only good news is that someone else believes it wasn’t Bucky who blew the building up.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Steve says, crossing his arms. It’s petulant, but he doesn’t give a shit. He’s tired. His bones hurt. Bucky’s still unconscious. “I’m not talking to the CIA. If they have a problem with it, refer them to my lawyer or something.”

“You don’t have a lawyer,” says Clint, rolling his eyes.

Steve resists the urge to sign  _fuck off_  at him. “So call Stark and get me one. Or give me a quarter, I’ll call him myself.”

“I’ll do it, Jesus,” Sharon says. She gathers up her crutches and hops up onto her good leg, giving Steve a highly unimpressed look. He remembers it well from the four months they dated. “I’ll go check on Hanae and give Stark a call. You go cool off for a while.”

As she limps away, Steve starts to feel bad.  He meant to ask how Hanae’s doing, if Sharon’s in a lot of pain, what her long-term prognosis looks like. He meant to call Peggy. He meant to be kinder to his team. Over the last few days, he’s tried to do a lot of things, but everything pales in comparison to Bucky right now.

To his left, Sam clears his throat and stands up. “Dude,” he says, voice exaggeratedly loud so that Clint will catch it and look up, “You want to grab some coffee? The cafeteria makes a mean cup of instant drip.”

Clint’s smile is a little lopsided; his left cheek caught a lot more gravel than his right. Or maybe he’s smirking at Sam’s transparent attempt to clear the room. “How could I say no to that?”

He dreads being alone with Natasha, but Sam and Clint don’t linger, and then he’s trapped. The long conference table boxes him in while her eyes bore into him. He determinedly doesn’t meet her gaze.

That lasts maybe a minute. “What?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Rogers,” she says. She taps her fingers on the table, slouching in her oversized sweater like a college student. It’s amazing how many people Natasha can be before lunch. “You forget I know your big gay secret.”

“It’s not a secret,” Steve says. He doesn’t look at her. “Just because I don’t tell anybody.”

“Are you avoiding the CIA because of that?”

”No.” He isn’t. He just isn’t looking forward to it, either. He’s read his own autobiographies, mostly because Natasha thought it would help him understand his own mythos. It’s bad enough to have his life scrutinized, his every relationship picked over; it’s worse when it’s accompanied by disgust and foaming intolerance. Feeling guilty, he shifts in his chair. “Not entirely.”

“Honestly, though, they’re going to prioritize the whole shooting-the-President thing way more than who you may have been sleeping with.”

Steve jolts like he’s been burned. The only people who know are supposed to be him, Bucky and Sam. Natasha is not supposed to know squat. “Who told you that?”

For the second time this morning, he receives an expression of almost pitying contempt. “When are you going to accept that I know everything, Steve?”

He pounds the table with his fist, gratified when it makes Natasha’s grin slip. It’s just a moment, but it’s there. “Stop smiling! Stop joking, stop—is everything a joke to you?”

That isn’t fair. He knows it isn’t. He regrets it as soon as he says it, but Natasha doesn’t get angry. She doesn’t even change her expression; she just stays curled up, cat-like, inspecting him the same way Bucky’s doctors inspect his back.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He puts his head in his hands. “I’m just so—I’m so tired.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m tired too.”

He looks at the woodgrain of the table, sticky with old coffee rings and other, less savory substances. Nobody’s really left the hospital yet, not since they all arrived. Even though Bucky is no longer in medical danger, it’s impossible to ignore the CIA in the lobby. Or the bugs that keep turning up in Natasha’s sweeps. Steve’s too afraid to ask her to check his apartment too.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when Bucky wakes up. What if Bucky leaves again? What if he doesn’t love Steve back? What if, even with his memories and his old feelings, he still wants to go?

The government is the least of his problems. Someone is always trying to kill him. Steve’s pretty used to it by now.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admits.

“None of us do,” Natasha says, gently. “Pretty sure that’s called faith, Rogers.”

He snorts. It’s not quite laughter. Mostly it’s relief.

"You love him," she says, and for once she doesn't say it with a smirk. When he raises his head and meets her eyes, she just watches him. She knows. She's known for a while now. She was in the ambulance with him and Bucky, after they finally pulled him free. Even if she didn't know, there was no way for Steve to hide it.  _Wear your heart on your goddamn sleeve, Stevie,_  Bucky grumbled, a million years ago, rubbing at the marks Steve left on his throat,  _It's gonna get us both found out._

Bucky was right, as usual. What else is new. He stands up and says, “I’m going back upstairs. Want to come with?”

“And miss out on the chance to stare at an unconscious guy?” Humor’s easier. She doesn't force him to confront what she said or what it means. “Lead the way, Rogers. Besides, it’ll give me a chance to work out which of the nurses are paid informants.”

“I thought nurses had to do no harm,” Steve says. He has to lean on her a little for support, his knee still achy and his stomach a web of fresh and sutured tissue, but she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even struggle propelling him up the stairs. “Isn’t selling your patients out to the feds the opposite of that?”

“Just because I’ve snuck into a hospital before doesn’t mean I know how to do the job,” she says. She’s holding him up a lot. He’s grateful for it.

Bucky almost looks serene when they check on him. Natasha hisses in sympathy at his burned back, flayed pink and nearly transparent, but she can’t resist a comment. “I suddenly feel content about the time he used me as target practice.”

Steve knows the feeling.

Out of everyone, he thinks Natasha understands most what Bucky is, what’s been done to him. Between the two of them, they have a pretty good understanding of pain, but Bucky’s got them both beat. The arm, the cryo, the scars that run up and down his body. His fingernails. A stray thought keeps running around Steve’s head:  _I don’t think I can go into shock any more_.

It was the bank vault that destroyed him; it was the chair and the buzz of blue-white energy boring into his skull. And even after that, Bucky managed to save him from the Potomac, to turn himself in, to slip through Logistics’ fingers and stay on his feet. What he said in the diner comes back to Steve, too:  _before the last procedure… I said something about you._  Despite everything, he remembered. That as much as anything is the reason that Steve can hope.

And Natasha. Natasha’s a survivor, too. They broke her into base components, and somehow, she’s managed to rebuild herself. Someone with a real smile and a real laugh, memories of her childhood and a potential for a future. Here she is, leaning over Bucky’s bed, a possibility.

The tangible hope for a miracle.

Steve really can’t ask for anymore.

*

On Friday morning, Bucky disappears.

Suffice it to say, he lets himself out the window. He didn’t even bother to shut it after himself. The doctors kept insisting that it was impossible, impossible, for a man to go from comatose to free-climbing down a sheer wall in less than six hours. Only their definition of impossible doesn’t seem to cover Bucky Barnes. When Steve finally nodded off, Bucky was handcuffed to the bed. When he woke up, the bed was empty.

“It’s not magic,” Sam says. He’s filling out Steve’s insurance forms for him. Its Friday afternoon. It’s incredibly odd, to be sat on Sam’s couch, watching him carefully write out Steve’s credit card information on an emergency room bill. “It’s not like, Thor magic, even. It’s certainly not regular old, poof, where did he go magic. The man climbed out the window.”

Steve doesn’t respond. Bucky has made a habit of climbing out windows. His hospital room was a mere seven stories, nothing compared to Steve’s apartment in Brooklyn. He even somehow managed to remove both his arms from his handcuffs without damaging them. He’s not surprised that CNN is earnestly discussing whether “witchcraft” played a hand in his disappearance.

Bucky, it turns out, is top-billing entertainment. If Steve flips on any old channel, he can watch Bucky’s badly burned body slide into an ambulance, or listen to pleas from the mayor for information, or even guess Bucky’s identity with Fox & Friends. The blessed miracle is that no one seems to know who the improbable survivor is.

“I’ll admit, that’s impressive. Even when I was in peak shape in the Air Force, I wasn’t climbing out any windows. I definitely wasn’t doing it two days after major surgery.”

Steve still doesn’t say anything.

“Steve.” Something about the way Sam says his name draws Steve out of his reverie, grounds him back in the actual moment. Sam’s got his lip between his teeth and he’s frowning. A split-second of clarity reminds him that Sam doesn’t usually babble like this. “Where’s your mind at, Steve?”

With Bucky. He shrugs and picks up a bill just for something to look at. The money he ran up for painkillers alone is insane. “I just want to know where he is.”

Nodding, Sam passes him another bill. “Sign that. I know you do.”

“I could help him, if he’d let me. If he would just let me help, Sam.”

“I don’t…” Searching for a tactful way to say it. That’s what Sam is doing. “That might be a lot to hope for. If you see Bucky again—”

“I’m not worried about that.”

Sam looks at him, stumped. “If you’re gearing up to do something heroic, I gotta tell you that you’re being an idiot.”

“I’m not. I don’t have a plan, or the resources, and everyone’s still torn up from the last mission. And a rogue government agency may be trying to kill us.” Sam wrinkles his nose at that. “But I know he’s out there. Bucky. The real him.”

Rather than skeptical, Sam looks outright disbelieving. Next time Steve makes a best friend, he’s not picking a shrink. Sam’s seen his every public fuck-up and private folly, and even though he rarely calls him on his shit, he knows. In some ways, it had been easier being Bucky’s best friend. Even though Bucky was always the first person to let him know he’d messed up, Bucky was also stupid in love with him. A lot of his little quirks and foibles, Bucky let go.

Sam doesn’t bother with such niceties.

“You’re crazy,” he says, shaking his head. “Man, you still got stitches in your gut and you’re ready to ride-or-die with him again. You don’t even know where he is.”

“Nope,” Steve agrees.

“Not to mention he almost got us all blown up,  _and_  he shot the president, and you’re going to trust him again?”

He tries to grin, to look wry and cocky and self-assured, but he knows his smile is softer. Fonder. “Natasha would call that faith.”

“Well, I call that stupid,” Sam says, but gently. He knocks his shoulder into Steve’s side, companionable, easy. Sam’s goodness and trust has kept him sane since the day they met. “Stupid and a long shot. Like, a really long shot.”

“He’s like a bad fucking penny,” Steve says. He doesn’t look out the window, poignant and sad, knowing that Bucky is out there. Bucky Barnes is alive and on the run, and Steve knows from experience that he’s the biggest pain in the ass and the stubbornest fuck alive to boot. It’s not a question of if they see each other again. It’s a question of when. “He always turns up.”

There’s a long beat, and then: “You really are a freak, Rogers,” Sam says, matter-of-fact.

“Yeah,” Steve says. He passes the insurance bill back to Sam. “Heard that one before.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> see, he isn't dead, lovelies. I'm mean but I'm not that mean. thank you for reading and the last part will be up soon! ♥


	8. Chapter 8

He dreams.

He didn’t dream in cryo. It wasn’t sleep but stasis: long years of waiting and waiting for something to happen. The asset doesn’t dream, but it analyzes when he does. Mostly, the asset is looking for clues. Something to do. Some purpose to fulfill. Right now, his purpose is to stay alive, stay hidden.

He dreams. He sleeps nestled in a corner of a cargo container, whipping north out of Washington on train tracks. His blood is all over the dark corrugated steel, in rivers and pools. Dripping. 

The mesh didn’t help. It couldn’t, but the doctors didn’t know. It takes a lot of out of him to admit that, even to himself in the loneliness of the empty alley. The doctors couldn’t know. If they did know, they would not have sewn mesh into his ravaged skin. They did not choose to hurt him.

Admitting this changed nothing. As his skin regenerated, it rejected the mesh. Violently. It couldn’t continue.

So he ripped it out.

And now he dreams.

He dreams about the old neighborhood. His apartment used to be above his dad’s dry-goods store on a nicer part of the block. Steve lived a few blocks over, in a crappy tenement. His bedroom window faced the ventilation shaft. But Bucky thought it was the best place in the whole world, because Steve lived there. 

It was warm, too. Sarah had tried to keep it homey, with good food when she could swing it and feminine touches. She sewed throw pillows out of scrap fabric, and she always hung Steve’s drawings. You could watch Steve and Bucky grow in those drawings, from skinny, scrappy kids to men. Steve’s lean-to bedroom was a palace; Bucky never felt safer than curled up at the end of Steve’s bed.

After Sarah died, Steve kept the place for a few months, then moved closer to the Navy Yard. He refused to let Bucky move in with him.  _Your ma needs the help at home, with the girls. Besides, it’s no place for a guy like you._ But he couldn’t keep Bucky away. He would have had to beat him off with a stick. He’d kiss his sisters goodnight and then his feet would point him home. All hours of the night, he’d walk the slick, dark streets, into the rough side of town. Looking for Steve’s window, lit up with gold against the night sky full of stars. Steve’s lonely little apartment with the whole world inside of it.

 _I love you, but goddamn it_ , Steve used to say, biting the curve of Bucky’s shoulder.  _You turn me into this jealous bastard, with your dates and your fast girls._

But none as fast as Steve. Is this a dream?  No—he saw him kiss Sharon, months ago. He never could stay away from those Carter women. There have been others, too. He didn’t always catch their names. And he wanted—God, he wanted Steve to move on. To be happy. To find something that would make James Barnes easy to forget.

Steve never listens. Not in his memories, not in his dreams.

 _Steve,_  Bucky said, mouth stinging from Steve’s teeth. It was Sunday morning, before the sunrise. He couldn’t ship out without his stupid hat.  _Steve, I only came to say goodbye—_

 _You can’t leave me behind_ , Steve said. Eyes red and swollen beneath the brim of Bucky’s cap.  _Just—I don’t know what I’m gonna do without you. I’m gonna miss you too much—_

 _I can love more than one person at a time_ , Steve said, and it hurt worse than having his fingernails pulled out. He’d been waiting his whole life for Steve to do better than him. When it happened, he wasn’t ready. Peggy: so competent, so beautiful, so dangerous. She had Steve’s sharp edges and the same big heart.  _God, Bucky, tell me you’re okay with this—with us?_

 _I love you more than anything,_ Bucky says, the last night before the train. He was in his blue coat, so he knows he’s dreaming it; that wasn’t how it happened. In his dream, he says,  _I love you more than anything, anything at all. Don’t miss me. Marry Peggy, okay? Okay?_

The train hums and whirs under his feet, and Bucky dreams.

*

Brooklyn tastes like he made it up. Every time he visits, he’s more and more disgusted. It’s an optical illusion, standing on familiar streets with neon signs and impossible buildings. Hipsters, too. The future shouldn’t come home to roost in the old neighborhood; it isn’t decent. It’s garish and gilt.

He hates this new city growing up through the skeleton of his old home, but he didn’t come here for the nostalgia. He has work to do.

First, he finds an apartment. It’s near Steve’s, but not so near. Near enough that he can track the building and watch. There are obvious government plants lurking in the lobby, and his limited mobility makes the window impossible. So he can’t go into Steve’s place. He can only watch.

Watching is better than nothing. From his abandoned apartment, he sets up camp and hunkers down. Steve’s in DC, and he will be for a while, if the CIA has anything to do with it. So Bucky can sit tight, monitor his back and wait.

When Steve returns, he may have to reassess. Steve’s not an idiot, even though he acts like one. If he catches a whiff of Bucky in the borough, Bucky will have to run.

He’s tired of running.

Still, he has to make contingencies, to satisfy the monster in his head if nothing else. If he goes after Logistics, like he always planned before Steve got involved, he’ll have something to do, at least. The asset will be satisfied. The asset likes concrete, actionable tasks. Murdering each and every person under the Logistics banner is a concrete, actionable task.

But that’s the future. Right now, he has to focus. Everything in the world condenses down into two constant thoughts: Steve and pain. He ignores the pain. He’s very, very good at it by now. But he can’t ignore Steve. The city is in love with him, and everywhere he goes, Steve’s face pops up. On books, on billboards, on  _Time_  magazine.

Some day, he’ll have to train himself not to feel a spasm of joy and crushing disappointment every time he catches sight of Steve’s face, even on a poster.

It’s magnetic, the pull Steve has on him. He spent so many months that he was _supposed_ to be taking on Logistics right in the neighborhood. How else could he keep Steve safe? And just the sight of him is comforting, somehow. Comforting and enraging and unravelling, all at once.

Like when he walks past a sports bar with its TV set to CNN. Lo and behold, it’s Steve, right there on television. He’s apoplectic with fury, and when he looks into the camera, Bucky irrationally thinks he’s looking right at him.

“I don’t have any comment,” he says. He’s using his officer voice, the one that always pulled Bucky up short when he was trying to keep Steve from doing something stupid. “If the CIA wants to keep me in the city of Washington, they’d better arrest me for a crime, because otherwise I’m a free citizen.”

Stupid, arrogant, incredible Steve. Bucky shakes his head. It’s stupid to pause like this, so exposed, but Steve’s too impressive to be missed. That fiery streak is what first drew Bucky in: he cursed out an eighth grader three times his size for picking on someone else. He was seven at the time. Bucky, fascinated, trailed after him for ages. It was Sarah who invited him in, because Steve refused to acknowledge his new hero-worshipper.  _He’s the bravest thing I ever saw_ , he said solemnly. And he meant it.

They ask Steve more questions, but he doesn’t answer. He barrels through the reporters, his friends Sam and Natasha right behind him. Natasha is smiling; Bucky vaguely remembers that he shot her.

There’s some speculation by the talking heads whether Captain America ought to be arrested (good luck, Bucky thinks), but everyone concludes that he’s leaving the city.

If he’s leaving, Bucky has a terrible premonition of where he’s headed.

He’ll have to move. He leaves the bar, ducks into the labyrinth of alleys that shields him from CCTV. Maybe he should sweep Steve’s apartment before he goes? No, Natasha was a spy, she can do that. He’ll be safe. Won’t he be safe?

His thoughts are a nervous whirl by the time he gets to his apartment. Not his, not exactly, but close enough. It’s  _his_  sleeping bag and  _his_  single plate (stolen from a dollar store) decorating the empty space. And it’s not so close to Steve’s place. There's no guarantee that Steve will find him here.

He hesitates. Maybe he and Steve can coexist in the city without Steve finding him. Maybe he can keep Steve safe this way.

Maybe he’s tired of running.

He keeps hesitating. He’ll leave tomorrow, unless he stays. Steve can’t find him in a single day. He’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.

*

Big mistake.

He makes a run for supplies and when he comes back, Steve Rogers is dripping wet, furious and sitting in his apartment. Bucky almost drops his bag. The moment he needs to recover is a moment Steve uses to pin him up against the wall.

“You stupid—”

“Steve,” he says, still shocked. Had the asset been in charge, it would not have made this mistake: the doorjamb was compromised. “How— _Steve—_ ”

His eyes are wild, with fear and anger and loneliness. Something else, something fonder and sweeter, the thing he doesn’t want to name. “There was  _so much blood_ , “ Steve hisses. The sharp points of his knuckles dig into Bucky’s chest like claws. “I thought you were  _dead_ , again,  _again_ , I couldn’t handle it, I couldn’t—”

Pain blinds him, and he makes an involuntary noise. Steve’s head jerks up, and he loosens his grip on Bucky’s shirt. “Shit… your back…”

“It’s fine.” Bucky touches Steve’s fists, soothes them into relaxing. Slightly. “Steve, what are you—how did you—”

The blood in the train car. Or the blood in the flophouse apartment where he removed the mesh. (Steak knife, dental floss, industrial bleach. The smell was terrible.) It doesn’t matter which one Steve found. Maybe he found both.

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” he says, instead of what he wants to say.

Steve’s rage is always incremental, gradual. It builds, and Bucky can feel the building in his clawed fists. “ _Don’t_ say that.”

“I’m not gonna thank you,” he says. If he’s harsh, maybe Steve will go away. Maybe Steve will save himself. “You shouldn’t have come here, you shouldn’t have put yourself in danger again.  You should go.”

“Just  _stop_ ,” Steve says. And then he does something that Bucky could not have predicted: he collapses.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, alarmed, because— _Jesus,_  Steve. Bucky’s armed and dangerous and possibly unstable. Steve doesn’t care: his knees give out, his forehead hits against Bucky’s clavicle, a soft cry escapes his throat. Bucky was wrong. It wasn’t rage; it was the other thing.

Memories catch him by the chest, the throat. This was their signal. It was the smallest possible fraction of their empty exhaustion, made palatable for others. Steve could tip his forehead onto Bucky’s shoulder in front of anyone. And he did. Covered in sweat and blood and worse, all across Europe.

The instinct inside of him makes his hand raise. He pats Steve’s hair. It’s awkward, but it’s right. Steve sags further, humming into Bucky’s skin. He does it again, willing it to feel like his memories say it should.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he says, careful not to spook him. “You don’t know I’m not dangerous.”

“I don’t care.” Steve’s skin is so hot against his, even through his shirt. Steve has touched him before (bedroom, L.A., white-knuckled hands in the hospital), but he wasn’t prepared for this. He can feel the shape of Steve’s mouth against his ribs, burning like a brand.

“You should care,” he insists. “Jesus, Steve, you should care.”

“Why?” When he stands back, Bucky hates and blames the part of himself that almost doesn’t let him go. “You didn’t care. You ran into that building.”

Not the same. A plan, a calculated sacrifice. Not heroic, but meaningful, at least. “That was different.”

Steve turns his head, a bitter expression curdling his features. “Si cujus opus arserit _._ Right? You said that, the night me and Peggy...”

 _Now_  he trails off. Now he decides to be decorous and save Bucky’s feelings. “Say it,” he challenges, out of spite. “Say it: you were gonna marry her.”

Steve swallows against the words he wants to say. “I was.”

It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt any more than in the 40s. He pushes off from the wall and walks away from Steve. “You should have.”

Oh. Low blow. Still, it feels nice to say it, to make Steve’s face scrunch up. He doesn’t watch but he’s sure Steve’s making that face. It was his talent, undercutting Steve. He’s lost plenty, over the years, but he hasn’t forgotten his best moves.

He kneels in front of the radiator and rolls his sleeve up to the shoulder. Behind him, Steve rages in silence, probably searching for a suitable comeback. He ignores him. The pain in his back, kept at a dull roar by the asset’s laser focus, becomes his whole world.

_Hurts hurts hurtshurtshurts._

He keeps silent as he probes the join between metal and skin. The rawness remains, but it has lessened. New skin is replacing the rot. The place where the arm is anchored to his spine throbs, but no more than usual.

Is Steve watching? He doesn’t know. He hopes he is, but also prays that he isn’t.

“Did you try to kill yourself?” Steve asks, shattering the silence.

He lets it hang in the air for a moment, and then rolls his sleeve back down. “No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“You knew it was going to blow. I don’t know how you did but you did, you knew they had it rigged to explode.” He says it like an accusation, instead of the best thing he’s done since his resurrection.

“That verse, si cujus opus arserit, it isn’t even about suicide,” Bucky complains. “You never paid attention in Mass.”

“Don’t you  _dare_  teach me Catechism right now,” Steve barks at him.

Bucky shuts up. Instead of looking at Steve, he stares at his hands. He tries not to think of all the blood on them.

When he speaks, his voice is measured and even, not like Steve’s frantic anger. “I’d been in there before. I saw where Logistics wired the explosives in. Wallingford didn’t know they’d done it, she was going to keep Sharon and Hanae in until the last moment.”

 There’s a bleak but sensible thought process behind that call. It’s nothing to sacrifice the weakest, vilest among you to save the good and the great. In a way, Bucky admires it.

Steve, however, he sounds like he’s going to throw up. “You could have told us—we could have evacuated. We could have gotten everyone out. You didn’t have to be in there. That was  _stupid_.”

He shrugs, because the alternative is to scream. “I didn’t trust you.”

“ _Me?!_ You  _shot_  me!”

“Because I had to! You always want to save people, you self-sacrificing piece of shit!” Without him noticing, his voice rises as he tugs on his wrist. “I knew you’d go in there, knowing it was set to blow. I have to take care of you, don’t you  _get_  that?”

Steve says something that’s almost a word. Bucky, meanwhile, looks down at his body, where his right arm is tearing at his left, and suddenly lets go. How long was he doing it? First he’s surprised, and then the noticing brings pain.

“Don’t do that,” Steve says. Bucky automatically drops his wrist (that makes Steve flinch), but Steve carries on. “Don’t  _ever_  feel like you have to do that.” He comes close, crouches down next to Bucky. “I’m not worth it, Buck.” 

Liar. Bucky looks into his eyes, sees the same boy he fell in love with, so many years ago. “I shot you to keep you safe,” he says, voice low.

“I know,” Steve says. “I knew it as soon as the building blew.” He reaches out for Bucky’s hand, and Bucky gives it to him. “You didn’t have to.”

“But I  _did_. You would have gone inside. I couldn’t keep you safe.”

Steve pulls him in closer, holds him by the elbow. “It’s not your job to keep me safe.”

“Yes it is.” Bucky doesn’t let him look away. That’s his best, most painful trick; Steve can’t ever turn away from him. “I can’t let you die. I don’t… I don’t know who I am without you.”

Steve melts, eyes closing in pain. “Buck… Your memories will come back—”

“I’m not talking about that,” he interrupts, shaking his head. “This is me, this has always been me. I don’t know who I am without you. Steve, you’re… You’re so good. And I don’t have anything left to be good for. My family’s gone, everyone’s gone.” Just for a moment, his grief is too much and he thinks he’ll cry; then he swallows it. He shrugs. “You’re all I’ve got.”

When Sarah died, Bucky promised he’d be there for Steve, and he was. He paid Steve’s rent when he couldn’t afford it, fed him, patched up his bruises, kicked his ass when he was being stubborn. But it wasn’t for Steve. It was selfish. And now, Steve’s the only person left in the world he cares about. Steve is all there is.

“You lied about remembering me,” Steve says, “You let me think you were dead.”

Bucky flinches, eyes closing in shame. “I thought you’d care less. That you’d move on. That you’d stop worrying about this.” His gesture includes himself, refers to himself.

This time he sees Steve coming. Indignation, anger, pain: Steve exhales them all as he grabs Bucky in his arms. He tries to be careful of Bucky’s back, the painful flesh there, but his arms are tight around him. And Bucky gasps, not with pain. “You’re so stupid,” Steve says, throat closed with tears. “You’re so goddamn stupid, you know that?

“You matter,” Bucky says softly.

“So do you. Goddamn it, Bucky. You’re all I have, too.”

Bucky laughs a wet, trembling laugh, and fits his cheek against Steve’s. It’s a quiet shock when Steve kisses him.

A good shock. A painful one. Steve kissed him first, hot and clumsy and mean as hell, jealous over a red-haired girl whose name he’s long forgotten. And Steve kissed him last before the train, apologetic and nostalgic. The night before his life was viciously rewritten, he’d tossed and turned, barely slept.  _Things can’t be the same,_  he’d snapped at Steve, hurrying to dress for their mission and tired, so tired.  _So stop acting like they can. Stop pretending you’re not leaving me the minute this war’s over._

Steve, the softie, grazes his lower lip, almost not-there-at-all. Maybe he’s rethinking it, maybe he’s being thoughtful, but Bucky can’t take it. He bumps their noses together in his sloppy haste to kiss Steve again. The whisper of pressure turns into something real, and Steve puts his hand on Bucky’s waist.

“I love you,” he says, almost whispering. “You know that?”

He knew. He just hates to hear it.

“Please come with me,” Steve says. He hasn’t lifted his head, or his hand, pressed as close as he can get. “I can help you.”

With what? Pills, doctors, fluorescent lighting? The Avengers watching him like a bug on a slide? The long arm of Logistics would find him, too. And he can’t bear that.

“No,” he says.

“No, you won’t come, or no, I can’t help you?” Steve asks, voice still quiet but fingers unmoving against his waist.

Both. “I’m not coming with you. I’m not gonna do that to you, Steve.”

“You have to. I can’t protect you here, that’s all I want.” And his eyes are so shiny-big, so honest, so true. That’s what he wants, and Bucky is keeping it from him.

“No,” he says again.

A frown splits his face, but he doesn’t hit. Even a year after cryofreeze, Bucky keeps waiting for the hit. “I’m not gonna leave you here, Bucky. I’m never gonna leave you alone again.”

This seems unlikely, so Bucky doesn’t say anything. And of course, Steve misinterprets his silence. “Is this because of Peggy? Because that’s not fair.”

“You should marry her,” he says. It’s true. “Or somebody else. Sharon, you liked her—”

“Listen to me!” Steve drags his face up with his hand, forces him to meet his eyes. It’s something Steve used to do when they argued, cold fingers dragging Bucky’s attention to heel. “Yes, I was in love with Peggy, and yes, I was going to marry her, but I was never, ever going to leave you behind. You  _know_  that. Peg didn’t even mind. And if it was 1945, maybe things would be different. But we’re here, and I don’t want to marry any random girl. Okay? You know what I want.”

She minded. She was just smart enough to know that Steve was worth the indignation. Shaking his head, Bucky looks away. “You shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, you don’t get to decide that, you dick. Don’t I deserve to make my own decisions?”

That stings. It’s the equivalent of a slap, fierce and grounding, and Bucky’s head jerks up. That’s  _not_  the way it is. ”I want you to be safe,” he insists.

“And I want you to be. I want you to come with me. Give me a chance, Buck. You spent a year, pretending to be dead, just to watch my six.” In the space between his words, Steve kisses him. Bucky can feel his heartbeat through the thin skin of his lips. “Let me return the favor.”

Kissing is bad. Kissing swirls all his thoughts, until Steve’s hand on his jaw is all mixed up with Steve bleeding from the stomach. If kissing weren’t so nice, so distracting from the pain, he’d put a stop to it. He wants Steve, but he wants Steve to be safe more. Or does he?

“I—I have to think about it,” he blurts. It makes Steve pull away, stare at him in confusion.

“Bucky?”

“I’m sorry—I have to—”

He scrambles out of Steve’s grasp, up onto his feet. Steve’s rosy and warm from kissing, stubble burning up his lower lip. His hair’s messy from Bucky’s hands. And he looks like Bucky just slapped him upside the head.

He should stay. He should leave forever. He should kiss apologies into Steve’s skin. He should disappear and never come back. All his options are garbling in his skull, a chorus line with no end and no right answer. Even the asset is lying low, waiting for the chaos to subside. He doesn’t know what to do.

Purely out of habit, when he flees the apartment, he uses the window.

*

It takes him a few hours to screw his head back on. That and the pain in his back: he needs to lie down. He’s shaky and nauseated when he lets himself back into the apartment, but he still tenses. Maybe Steve is here. Maybe he called the Avengers in.

He didn’t. The apartment is empty, but tidier—Steve washed his lonely dish. The idea of him alone in here, scrutinizing his sleeping bag, his gear, his single plate, makes him terribly sad. But it’s better this way.

Isn’t it?

There’s a note on his bedroll. Bucky recognizes the handwriting from across the room, but who else could have left it? His fingers are trembling as he unfolds it.

_If it’s what you really want, I’ll leave you alone. I won’t come after you. (Can’t promise the Avengers won’t, but I’ll put in a good word.)_

It isn’t what he wants; Steve is such a goddamn moron. Even when he was pretending to be dead, he couldn’t keep himself away. He kissed him in that stupid garden in L.A. because he wanted to. He let Steve press him into his living room carpet because he desperately missed him. There hasn’t been a moment since he woke up when he hasn’t wanted Steve near him.

But Steve is too important.

_~~When~~ _ _If you change your mind, I’ll be having breakfast at my usual place._

_-Stevie_

When. He crossed it out, but he wrote when. Of course he did. Steven Rogers, little shit, confident he’ll change his mind. And that’s Steve’s greatest gift: his faith. He hasn’t wavered. He couldn’t. And Bucky’s sure that he’ll be waiting at that shitty diner, the one he found him in, every day. He’ll wait forever for Bucky to come home.

Bucky exhales, makes a decision, and crumples the note in his metal fist.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> final warning: some discussion of past-suicidal tendencies.

Two days after James Buchanan Barnes jumps out of a window, _again_ , he drops in on Steve’s favorite café in Flatbush. “You win,” he says, “I’m coming in. I’ll—”

That’s as far as he gets before Steve drags him into his arms, refusing to let go.

*

Cold. Against his foot. Steve is floating just beneath consciousness, dimly aware of the world above but content to keep dreaming, until he feels warm, unwelcome drool against his shoulder.

“Why,” he groans, face caught in the pillow. Behind him, Bucky sighs and shuffles forward. As if there were any space left. Even half-asleep, Steve can feel the down-soft brush of Bucky’s breathing against his spine.

He shuffles over, turning until he can look at Bucky. His knee stings in vague protest at that, but it’s just growing pains; in the week since Bucky shot him, he’s regained almost total function. By the end of next week, he should be back in marathon-running form.

The serum that Bucky received is not the same as his, so he shouldn’t be surprised that it works differently. Steve heals easily from most wounds, but Bucky was able to survive unthinkable injuries. The trade-off is that the ravaged mess on his back is taking far longer than Steve’s smaller, less catastrophic wounds.

Of course, Bucky added in some hack self-surgery, too. His body was rejecting the skin graft the doctors did, so he cut it out. He didn’t even realize it was a graft; Steve had to tell him. What was most sickening was the way he seemed relieved. _They did try to help me, then._

Steve’s love for him is terrifying. It’s been a year, and Pierce is dead, Zola is dead, Wallingford is dead. He’s done his best to eradicate HYDRA _and_ Logistics, but when Bucky sounded surprised that his doctors were trying to help him, not hurt him, he almost lost his mind. He almost ran out to find someone else to punish for Bucky’s pain.

He smooths the hair away from Bucky’s forehead, what little survived the fire, and breathes. He can’t live like that anymore. He can’t, and Bucky sure as hell can’t either. It will swallow them whole if they let it. That’s why they came to this safehouse: to give them both a chance to figure out who they are and what they want.

“Steve?” Bucky mumbles, stirring awake from Steve’s hand against his skin. His eyes stay shut as he reaches with his right hand for Steve. Not his left arm, the one free and available, albeit tucked carefully away, where it won’t brush up against Steve. Steve, melting, leans forward into Bucky’s hand.

“Coffee.” Kissing Bucky’s temple, he stands up. “I’m gonna go make some.” Then he makes that a lie by standing, watching reverently while Bucky dozes.

The patchwork quilt has scrunched up around Bucky’s waist, showing off the webwork of his fragile new skin. The furious red of the new skin is bleaching away, leaving behind a network of ridges and slopes and veins of white. Even this is disappearing; from the outwards in, the burns are softening, mellowing, fading into invisibility.

“Steve,” Bucky says. When Steve looks at his face, his eyes are open and his expression gentle. “Coffee, you lug.”

“Right.” Steve kisses him again, on the corner of his mouth.

He pees, brushes his teeth and then wanders into the kitchen. The bright Midwestern sunshine blinds him as he steps into the kitchen, so much so that he almost runs into Natasha. “Whoah,” he says, steadying her. She slips out of his grasp like water, laughing at something Sam said.

“I made two pots of coffee for my two supersoldiers,” she says. Steve smiles at her as he pours himself a cup. “And Sam’s going to make waffles.”

Sounds heavenly. “You two are in a good mood,” he comments, sitting at the table. Sam’s reading the sports section in the _Manhattan Mercury_ and humming under his breath. They’re both wearing pajamas, as if they’ve woken up and become ordinary, non-superhero people who enjoy lazy mornings with friends.

“Oh, we’re having a blast. It’s like sleepaway camp. Nat’s gonna make s’mores tonight,” Sam says. Maybe it’s the early morning or the strangeness of the situation—the four of them loaded up and departed for one of Tony’s safehouses only yesterday—but Steve can’t tell if he’s joking or not. He’s never had a s’more. It’s probably a seminal experience.

Still smirking, Natasha asks, “How are you two holding up?”

“Oh, you know,” Steve says. They’re in Kansas, hiding from the CIA and worse, with an ex-spy and a trained therapist. This house has shag carpeting and no TV, but 38 ways to contact Tony Stark and/or JARVIS. And Bucky has cold toes. “I got waffles and coffee, how can I complain?”

They aren’t fooled. They don’t even crack a smile. Sam folds his newspaper over and gives him that shrink look. “Seriously, man.”

This is where it gets tricky. Things are _wonderful_ —Bucky is asleep in his bed, warm, safe, whole. He let Steve kiss him last night, when he went white-knuckled at the over-the-head harness on Stark’s quinjet. And again when Steve tried to sleep on the couch; Bucky, so unsure of himself, worked his way into his arms and asked him not to leave.

But it’s too good. It’s rose-tinted. It’s the first twenty-four hours. There’s still so much to discuss, to plan, to _solve_ , but thinking about it disrupts their fragile equilibrium. Naming each problem would only make it worse.

He settles on saying, “It’s better than it’s been. And that’s been plenty to hope for.”

Sam nods, thoughtful. His hands are crossed over his newspaper, fingers drumming against the woodgrain, but they stop when Sam spots Bucky in the doorway. Like a ghost, Bucky made no sound as he walked through the house.

Since waking, he’s thrown on an innocuous t-shirt, hiding his burned back but showing off his metal arm. He’s the only person packing a lethal weapon at the breakfast table, but it’s attached to him. And the rest of him is soft, sleep-rumpled, and looking at Steve for any kind of suggestion or clue.

Steve stands up. “Buck?”

Slowly, Bucky looks at Natasha and Sam. He saw them last night, briefly, as they got into the quinjet, and again when they “borrowed” a car and then took a taxi and then walked to the house—but he hasn’t said a word the whole time, except to Steve.

 “Good morning,” he says at last, in a raspy voice. Beneath his sleepy vulnerability, his eyes are roving for weapons, escape avenues, possible weaknesses; Steve knows that expression well. Hyper-alert and half-asleep at the same time. “Steve said there’d be coffee.”

“Here,” Natasha says. Instead of handing him the cup, she puts it down within his reach, handle facing him. She knows what he’s gone through, so she knows instinctively to put the cup down. Bucky’s face is bland, but Steve’s grateful enough for the both of them.

Bucky lifts the cup, inhales. The cup is steaming, hot to the touch, and it smells burnt from where Steve is sitting. His eyes widen just enough that you’d have to be looking to catch it. “How did you…?”

“Know you take it burnt?” She lets her gaze slide over to Steve, and Bucky’s follow. He turns red under Bucky’s scrutiny. “A little birdy told me.”

No he didn’t. Somehow, she found out herself and made it for him. For that, Steve loves her, and from the way the corner of her mouth _just_ lifts, she knows it.

Without blinking, Bucky looks first at Steve, then at Natasha, like maybe he wants to ask another question. But she doesn’t linger. She takes a seat next to Steve, the one with its back to the front door, leaving Bucky the option of sitting. He doesn’t take it. Instead, he stands there, quiet, drinking his burnt coffee.

Steve says, “Sam’s making waffles.” This makes Sam wave, as if Bucky won’t know who he is. Beneath his tired eyes, Bucky’s mouth twitches.

“Cool. Sam Wilson, right?” Nodding, Sam gives him his most therapeutic smile. In response, Bucky turns a lazy, disarming grin on him, and says, “Sorry I tried to kill you.”

Natasha laughs, for about a half a second, before falling silent at Steve’s glare.

But it doesn’t rattle Sam; very little rattles Sam. It makes him an excellent friend and a damn fine superhero. “Hey, man, no worries. I seem to remember pointing a gun at you a fair number of times.”

And they both laugh. _God_ , this breakfast is surreal: everyone has tried to kill or almost been killed by someone else at the table. And Sam’s got the damn newspaper out like he’s Mr. Rogers while Natasha fills up their coffee cups.

“Hey, can I ask a question?” Just like Natasha knows, Sam _knows_ that Bucky’s smirk is a front, so he asks him a neutral, easy question. Soothing without being patronizing. For the first time, Bucky’s shoulders relax a fraction of an inch. “Did you really climb into Steve’s apartment? That was a lot of floors.”

Before he answers, Bucky makes a quick study of Sam’s face. He doesn’t know these people. He’s taking Steve on faith that they’re trustworthy. “Sometimes. Mostly, I climbed down a few floors and let myself into a vacant place. Like when you broke my arm, I stayed there for two days.” He does that adolescent lean, one foot behind the other, against the counter. “Made it easier to keep track of Steve.”

Something half-pain, half-gratitude pricks Steve’s chest. “You were watching me?”

He shrugs. “Mostly. I tried to go after Logistics, but every time I did, you were sticking your nose into trouble.”

“How’d you shoot the President without getting caught?” Sam asks, still non-judgmental.

“Switched guns with a Secret Service agent,” he says. He sips some coffee, shrugging his shoulders, unaware that that ought to be impossible. The President also made a full recovery from Bucky’s pinpoint accurate gutshot, so that _does_ add to the mystique. Steve smiles into his lap at Sam’s slack-jawed expression. “Hid in the school. It was a long way to shoot with a .357, but I figured I’d make it.”

Still looking reverent, Sam nods. On the other hand, Natasha’s not nearly so impressed; she leans forward, chin on her knee, scrutinizing him. “Why did HYDRA want him dead, specifically? It’s been bothering me.”

“Oh. That. They, uh, they wanted to destabilize, send commodity prices spiraling. And it would give them an excuse to ramp up against the Soviets, ‘cause they’re in the Levant. I think.” He scrunches his arms up into his sleeves, til his elbows are tucked up against his body. Is Bucky _nervous_? His eyes flicker over to Steve for help. “Um. I’m bad with geography.”

A stunned silence belly-flops over the room for several seconds. Even Steve is surprised, although he tries to hide it. “You’re bad with geography?” Natasha repeats.

“Yeah, I’m terrible at it. It was my worst grade in my school. The teacher had it out for me.” Bucky continues to look nervous, sleeves drowning his hands where they lie in his lap, but Steve laughs, sudden and bright.

“You got a _B_ in that class, stop complaining. And you were the only guy in the unit with any sense of direction. Without you, Gabe and Monty would still be stuck in Switzerland.”

“There were girls in Switzerland,” Bucky says, mostly to Sam, whose eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “And they wanted to stay where the pretty girls were.”

Delighted, Steve slumps in his chair, laughing. Bucky tosses him another agitated glance that smooths out into a look of tentative happiness. He seems to be pleased that he made Steve laugh. But it’s more than that: Bucky’s mind danced from their spiteful teacher, Sister Aloysius, to that June night in Geneva. _Kinda unfair, don’t you think?_ Bucky said, when he finally crawled into Steve’s tent, his drunk comrades safely retrieved and tucked in for the night. _Making me drag the boys away from their mademoiselles, and then you come sniffing all over me._

 _It’s good to be a captain,_ Steve agreed, unbuckling Bucky’s belt.

Natasha smiles her mysterious smile, saying, “Charming,” and Bucky offers her a small smile of his own.

This is what he wanted to put into words: it’s wonderful. It can’t possibly last—that feeling of sleepaway camp, of golden, untouchable calm will end. Sooner rather than later, if their luck holds. He feels the same way he did before Bucky shipped out the first time, that summer when Bucky had his sergeant’s stripes and the whole city lay open at their feet.

But damn it if it isn’t the least of what they deserve.

Looking at the oven clock, Natasha says, “We should start the waffles now.” She looks over at Sam with a pointed expression.

Her message is immediately received. “You two, go get dressed,” Sam says, waving his newspaper at him. “Waffles are a formal occasion in this safehouse.”

Steve’s prepared to put up a fuss, launch easy comments about Sam’s own pajamas, but Bucky puts his mug down and leaves the room. Because he wants so badly to keep Bucky close, Steve follows right behind him.

“You gonna shower?” he asks Steve, as they climb up to the second floor.

“No. Might go for a run later, don’t want to do it twice.”

The rest of the day seems like an endless chore from here. He has to call Tony and see what his lawyers say. He has to liaise with Natasha’s intelligence contacts. He has to figure out how to buy groceries for two humans and two supersoldiers without attracting attention. All he really wants to do is spend the day in bed with Bucky, listening to his heartbeat, making sure he’s safe. And maybe come up for air long enough to try a s’more.

Bucky pulls up short at the doorway to their room, so suddenly that Steve almost walks into the doorway to compensate. He cocks his head, hesitating. Steve thought it was the Soldier who did that, that strangely robotic head tilt, but Bucky _is_ the Soldier. He’s more than the sum of his parts. “Do you regret it?”

He waits, dreading the second-half of that sentence. “What?”

“Finding me. Bringing me in. Going to Kansas in the middle of the night.” He shrugs. He won’t meet Steve’s eye. Good, because Steve kind of wants to hit him for being so stupid.

“Of course I don’t regret it,” he says, “How could I _ever_ regret that?

He seems frustrated. “I don’t _know_. I just—I figured you would have reconsidered by now.”

And then he goes into their room without follow-up, feet still silent on the carpet. He grabs a pair of jeans from Steve’s suitcase without asking. He walks into the bathroom and doesn’t bother to shut the door more than half-way. Without moving from where he stands, Steve waits, turning that sentence over in his head.

Reconsidered?

“I got another question for you,” Steve asks, watching Bucky in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. “Would you really have wanted me to marry Peggy?”

It forces him to hesitate, toothbrush dangling from his mouth. After a beat, he makes eye contact with Steve in the reflection, still silent.

It’s fine. Steve can wait.

He brushes his teeth, then spits. Wiping his face with the back of his right arm, he finally finds some words. “I would have hated it, but… yeah. I wanted you to.”

It confirms what he’s long suspected. Bucky was paralyzingly jealous of Peggy as a concept, although fond of her as a person. It always seemed so cut-and-dry that he would marry Peggy and keep Bucky close, but Bucky was convinced it wouldn’t, couldn’t, work.

“What about before her? When I was skinny. Were you waiting for me to get married and leave you?”

He doesn’t answer. He exhales and splashes water on his face. He avoids Steve’s eye.

“You were,” Steve guesses. “You weren’t just waiting for it. You were counting on it.”

Bucky freezes. There’s water running off his face in drops, onto the collar of his shirt, and he just stands there and lets it. In any case, Steve doesn’t need confirmation; he’s had years of it. _You’ll really, really like this girl,_ Bucky promised, twice a week, before Steve was summarily rejected and often abandoned. And he very rarely did like the girls. He liked Bucky, and Bucky’s easy laugh, and the dips and valleys of Bucky’s spine.

“And that’s why you talked to Peggy, and to Sharon,” he says, coming closer. Not one part of Bucky moves—he’s barely breathing. “Because you wanted me to walk away from you. It wasn’t just about keeping me safe, was it?”

He doesn't ask if Bucky loves him. He's never had to doubt that, not even for a second.

But Bucky won't say anything. He's bunched up so brittle that another word might snap him in half. That’s not what Steve wants. He just wants Bucky to talk to him, to be smart for once.

“Hey,” he says, quiet and soft, telegraphing all his moves before he makes them. “Can I touch you?”

After a long moment, Bucky nods jerkily. His shoulders are hunched, making him smaller and less threatening, but also tugging on the delicate skin on his back. Steve, with enormous care, puts a hand on his shoulder. The injured skin burns hot against the heel of his hand.

In the mirror, over his shoulder, Bucky watches him. Steve looks at his back, at the metal plating and rough skin barrier where the arm joins his body. The star they painted has been scratched off crudely, as if with a knife.

“I can’t be your penance. I couldn’t even if I wanted to be,” Steve says. He strokes over Bucky’s spine to lessen the sting.

Bucky hunches again, pulling the thin skin of his back taut. “Yeah,” he says, looking down at his hands. “Nothing’s gonna make up for what I’ve done.”

Breathe, he tells himself. He forces his voice to be calm. “You’re more than what they did to you,” he says. “And so am I.”

“Like that matters,” Bucky scoffs. When he looks up, he’s done it again: he’s slipped into lazy and offhand, completely detached. The smile that used to light up Brooklyn dances on his face, as fake as a three-dollar bill. “You know I wasn’t ever any good for you.”

“What?” Steve says idiotically, but Bucky ignores him. He pushes past Steve without actually touching him, like he’s counting on Steve to give him space. It works—Steve almost trips over his own feet getting out of his way. Bucky doesn’t say anything about it, but his smirk has stretched into bitterness at the edges.

“Don’t look so surprised, Steve. Let’s face it, I was a spoiled kid who grew up to be a piss-poor soldier before I got captured by HYDRA. Twice.” The arm spasms at that, as if a stray bolt of electricity has sent it twitching. He ignores it. “I just—you deserve somebody who’s good.”

Flabbergasted, Steve stares at him. “You _are_ good.”

“Am I?” Bucky says, and although there’s a miserable irony stamped on every syllable, he can’t keep his face from falling. His grin looks cracked down the middle. He’s so lost. “Tell me, Stevie, you really think I’m any good?”

There’s no question, of course. It makes his chest ache that Bucky could ever ask him that, although he understands. He tries to, anyway. Bucky is standing in front of him with his wounded animal-heart and his face turned away, and Steve doesn’t know where to start to convince him.

Whatever he is, he’s good.

Steve inhales through his nose and crosses to sit on the bed. He tries not to notice that Bucky is tensed, waiting for a blow. “Do you remember the fight on the helicarrier?” he asks, voice as steady as he can make it.

Bucky nods, still not moving.

“God, you hit me hard. Those bullets were bad enough, but man. You can really throw a punch.” He smiles bleakly at Bucky, who doesn’t respond. “Sorry. Not funny, I know.

“You were so far under, I don’t know if you remember this.” He deserves to know. It’s the only reason he can force himself to say it. “But when I put the chip in, I told them to fire on us. I knew there was a chance—” He breaks off, chest shaking. His vision is blurred. “Fuck, I did more than that. I threw the shield. I gave up. I didn’t have to. I could have saved myself. But I was in _so much pain_ and I didn’t want a way out.”

He’s surprised to find he’s crying. Bucky is staring at him with a mix of horror and pain on his face. “Steve…”

“I gave up. That’s the worst thing I ever did. I killed kids, too, you remember Partenen? Or that scout who couldn’t’ve been more than fourteen? I worked for HYDRA. And I didn’t save you, Buck, Jesus, I could have, I _should_ have—”

The words stop as he chokes up, tears and snot running down his face. He hasn’t thought about this in years, hasn’t let himself. It comes back to him like a wallop, getting inside him, eating him up from the inside out. All the things he’s failed. All the ways he’s failed to deserve to be here.

Bucky’s hand touches his hair. He’s standing between Steve’s knees, touching him so gently, like he’s afraid it won’t be allowed. Steve abandons all his careful rules about space and boundaries and buries his faces in Bucky’s stomach. He breaks down and cries.

Bucky doesn’t seem to mind. He sounds as wrecked as Steve feels when he says, “It’s okay, it’s okay, Steve, it’s not your fault.” And he means it.

Steve knows, on some level. His nightmares and his anxious guilt ignore this truth, but he does know. He pulls away but can’t go far, kept close by Bucky’s soft fingers, gentle in his hair. “I know it’s not. And it’s not yours either.”

For a moment, he thinks Bucky will freeze up or run away; instead, he makes his face blank again. “Steve—”

“No,” Steve says. He gathers both of Bucky’s hands in his, forces Bucky to look him in the eye. “You can’t have it both ways. You still think I’m good, right? Even after that? Even after I went all _opus arserit_?”

He doesn’t know if he means that Latin as a joke or as an apology. He should never have asked if Bucky went in that building to blow himself up. He should never have doubted him. Bucky tries to smile, but his expression settles into something thoughtful.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. Steve keeps hold of his wrists, gentle as he can, tracing patterns over Bucky’s skin. Finally, he speaks. “I tried to tell you, it’s not about suicide. It’s about salvation. _Ipse autem salvus erit, sic tamen quasi per ignem_. That’s the end of the verse.” He looks down at his hands, one metal, one skin. “Even though you get burned, you can still be saved by the fire.”

Like an ancient echo, Steve thinks he remembers that. He thinks he remembers his Ma explaining it, her voice like a song in her half-Gaelic, half-English. The fire doesn’t destroy you; it purifies you.

“You’ve been through hell enough,” Steve says. They both have. “When I gave up, you saved me. You remembered me. After all they did to you, you remembered me on that helicarrier.”

He closes his eyes. Yes, it was true. Nearly a year ago, Bucky sat in a diner and tried to lie. But he did remember, and he saved himself. Saved Steve, too. What has Steve ever done that comes close to that?

“I love you,” he tells him, the most important truth of his whole long life.” I love you so goddamn much. If you want to be good, I’ll help you. Whatever you want to do. Fight Logistics, save the world, rescue kittens from trees, I don’t care. But you don’t have to do it to deserve me. You don’t have to earn me, or kindness, or to be alive at all. You’re good enough.”

He shakes his head. He always was stubborn. “I don’t feel good.”

"Hey, me neither sometimes.” Isn’t that the truth. “But I’m trying to be. I’m trying _so_ damn hard.”

Bucky’s face is wet with tears. But he smiles, because he’s brave. “Me too, Stevie. Me too.”

He crawls into Steve’s lap, an unexpected gift that Steve is smart enough to seize with both hands. Crumbling with relief, he presses his face into Bucky’s neck and just breathes. Just focuses on breathing, Goddamnit. “So we’ll do that,” he promises. “We’ll be good. We’ll find a way.”

“Course we will,” Bucky says. He’s shaking. He’s broken. He’s alive. He’s in Steve’s arms, where he belongs. “I can do anything, as long as I’m with you.”

*

That night, Natasha does make s’mores. Because there’s no firepit, she builds a fire in a small saucepan—“You learn interesting things, being a spy,” she quips, when Steve stares—and they roast marshmallows over it. It’s a little fire, so it takes a while.

“This is bullshit,” Sam says, shaking his head. He keeps trying to poke at her fire, before she shoos him away. “Little-ass fire. You would not get your fire chit with this pathetic excuse for a fire.”

Bucky looks confused. “Boy Scouts,” Natasha explains.

“We didn’t have Boy Scouts in our neighborhood,” Steve says. Bucky’s half on top of him, stealing all the blanket, sticking his icy fingers up Steve’s shirt. Kansas gets chilly in the evening, so it’s lucky that Stark safehouses come equipped with tartan blankets. On top of the blanket, Bucky’s also wearing two sweaters to ward off the cold. Steve, painfully aware of why he hates it, is happy to keep him warm.

“We used to fight with the Polish kids down the block,” Bucky says. His hair is soft against Steve’s cheek. Maybe he’ll grow it out again, grow out those impractical bangs that Steve loves. “So we learned all the important skills, like brawling and first aid.”

Shaking his head, Sam watches as Natasha’s marshmallow begins to smoke. “How can you learn to be a man without making a sit-upon out of newspaper—take it out, it’s on fire, take it out!”

“It’s supposed to be on fire!”

“No it is not, you Soviet dumbass, how would you know anyway?”

Steve presses his small, secretive smile into the curve of Bucky’s throat. There’s a mark there, because he’s nothing if not predictable. When Bucky caught sight of it in a mirror, he smiled. _Just like old times, Steve,_ he said, _I missed you. I missed this._

Humming, Natasha sandwiches the burnt marshmallow between two graham crackers. There’s chocolate in there, too. She presents it to Bucky with a flourish. “Eat it,” she says, when he looks at it askance, “Trust me.”

“Trust you? Didn’t I try to kill you, too?” He still accepts it from her hand.

“Russians don’t hold grudges.” Her eyes are dancing as Bucky bites into it, although that might be the fire. Might be the incandescent joy bursting up through Steve’s chest, at this day, at Bucky’s presence, at his surprising third chance at life. “What do you think?”

He chews it carefully like his answer is a test. “It’s okay,” he says at last.

“Bull _shit_ ,” Sam says. He’s laughing and playacting, but he doesn’t raise his voice, careful not to spook Bucky. “You made it wrong, Natasha, give me that stick. Let a real Boy Scout show you how it’s done.”

Steve tries one. It’s mushy, sickly sweet, and tastes like wood smoke. He likes it.

The stars shine like searchlights in the darkness. Bucky jumps each time the fire crackles, but he eats six s’mores and half the bag of marshmallows. “I’m fine,” he lies, when Steve asks, and kisses him to stop him from worrying. “I’m gonna be fine.”

That, Steve believes. Oh, the future’s a fucked up place, with ripped-out fingernails and rogue government agencies and so many problems, so many impossible opportunities for evil, but despite everything, he believes. How could he not, with Bucky by his side?

They’re quiet. The fire burns itself down into a golden ember. Sam puts his arm around Natasha and they look at constellations in the brilliant, oversized sky.


End file.
